The Challenge

One of the top global leaders in automotive manufacturing faced significant challenges in managing and accessing critical knowledge across its diverse teams. The company’s employees were working in silos and struggling with fragmented data spread across various departments and business units. Employees relied heavily on personal networks to find information, overburdening subject matter experts and creating bottlenecks during pivotal innovation phases. They consistently spent significant time searching for technical specifications, design documents, and previous project insights. Further, employees did not trust the integrity of the information available to them, limiting their ability to reuse past information efficiently. The company engaged Enterprise Knowledge (EK) to conduct a Knowledge Management (KM) Strategy and solution implementation project plan after the failure of multiple KM initiatives. The engagement’s long-term goal is to establish a shared Knowledge Management System (KMS) to streamline access to crucial information, better leverage experts’ institutional knowledge and experience, and decrease new employees’ time to proficiency.

The Solution

While the company originally sought a single platform to solve all KM challenges, EK’s assessment and collaboration identified a more integrated approach, leveraging existing systems, KM best practices, and semantic foundations. This initial 9-month engagement covered KM organizational design and governance, taxonomy and ontology development, as part of a scalable semantic layer technology architecture, UI/UX design, and a knowledge graph to drive long-term KMS adoption and sustainability. 

Evolving into a multi-year KM transformation, EK focused on creating a strategic and technical framework to drive sustainable KM practices. This phase centered on developing a clear roadmap for KM improvement, designing a KMS proof of concept (PoC), and ensuring the solutions aligned with the company’s evolving needs. The envisioned KMS would serve as a centralized knowledge portal, aggregating multiple applications and platforms to offer a single point of access to a holistic, connected view of the information that employees need to effectively perform their work. The following activities laid the foundation for a fully integrated system and long-term success:

Understanding Business Needs and Requirements
The first phase of the project focused on understanding the company’s business, technical, and functional requirements for the KMS. In a matter of weeks, EK engaged with 100+ select employees (representative of their 24,000-person workforce) and evaluated more than 10 business-critical systems using a hybrid approach that combined top-down (focus groups, interviews, and technical demos) and bottom-up (content and data analysis) research methods.

Insights to Strategy and Roadmap
These inputs informed a comprehensive KM strategy assessment that evaluated the company’s current KM maturity. Combined with inputs from their leadership, EK developed a tailored three-year roadmap for improvement with a focus on three key areas: content governance, user engagement, and knowledge sharing.

Establishing a Sustainable Operating Model
To support long-term sustainability, EK designed a KM operating model that provided a detailed framework to operationalize a KM Center of Excellence (CoE). The KM Org Function & Operating Model included dedicated KM roles and business unit representatives tasked with driving adoption and embedding KM practices across the organization.

Developing the Knowledge Portal PoC
In parallel, EK designed and deployed a Knowledge Portal PoC hosted in the company’s AWS environment. The portal was powered by a knowledge graph and a taxonomy and ontology management solution, consolidating information from multiple systems into a single landing page. The interface was developed using design thinking principles to ensure intuitive navigation and ease of use.

User-Centered Design and Testing
EK facilitated extensive discovery sessions with a variety of stakeholders to define user personas and journey maps. The team tested a clickable prototype and continuously refined the PoC based on stakeholder feedback, ensuring the solution reflected real-world user needs.

Scalable Technical Architecture
To support future growth, EK also provided technical architecture recommendations designed to scale with the company’s data demands. These recommendations were anchored in the semantic layer and security standards to ensure the solution can integrate seamlessly with existing systems, deliver reliable performance, and accommodate advanced AI capabilities over time.

The EK Difference

EK prioritizes iterative, user-driven, sustainable solutions while demonstrating dynamic responsiveness to client needs. Engaging a diverse cross-section of employees, EK leveraged expertise in KM and design thinking to facilitate virtual and onsite sessions, bringing together over 100 employees from various business units efficiently to capture diverse user perspectives. To minimize the level of effort and time from employees, EK employed a variety of validation activities to collect user feedback to refine deliverables and align them with company milestones and leadership briefings. Leveraging an Agile framework, EK held regular reviews, providing visual updates and executive briefings for incremental, efficient processes aligned with strategic goals. 

To promote long-term adoption and cultural change, EK embedded knowledge transfer into every project phase, conducting ongoing working sessions to upskill employees in KM principles, practical system use, and day-to-day maintenance. These sessions were designed to build immediate capability and empower employees to integrate KM practices into how they work moving forward. EK also equipped stakeholders with tailored educational materials and actionable training recommendations to support continuous KM growth. These efforts fostered stronger user ownership and helped lay the foundation for a sustainable, self-sufficient KM culture beyond the project’s completion. 

To meet the complexity of the company’s KM goals, EK assembled a multidisciplinary team capable of bridging business, technical, and functional perspectives. The team included software engineers, KM specialists, taxonomy and ontology experts, and UI/UX designers, each bringing unique expertise to translate complex requirements into actionable components. This cross-functional structure enabled EK to offer integrated recommendations that addressed both technical implementation and non-technical KM strategies. Working across simultaneous workstreams, the team maintained steady progress while ensuring alignment between business needs and system design. As priorities evolved, EK expanded its team to include a dedicated UI/UX design group, focused on crafting an interface tailored to the company’s specific context. The iterative design approach allowed for ongoing refinement, ensuring the KMS fit seamlessly within the company’s environment and supported long-term adoption.

The Results

By the end of the first phase, EK positioned the company to take decisive steps toward long-term KM maturity. The comprehensive three-year KM Strategy Roadmap clarified and prioritized the company’s most pressing KM challenges, offering a phased path forward grounded in its unique business context. The KM Org Function & Operating Model and Governance Plan define the resourcing, roles, and decision-making structures needed to embed KM into the company, ultimately helping leadership identify where to upskill, hire, or realign talent to support KM goals within their current structure.

To accelerate adoption and ensure stakeholder alignment, EK also deployed a Knowledge Portal PoC in the company’s Cloud environment. This allowed staff to experience core portal functionalities, such as integrated project views and intuitive search, and provide input on usability, informing future enhancements. Behind the scenes, EK’s semantic layer framework (taxonomy/ontology and knowledge graph models) laid the groundwork for smarter data connections, improving content findability and relevance in ways that resonate with end users.

The company leadership acknowledged the approach and priority—funding the implementation and next phases of the program and engagement. With the project extended over three years, EK continues to  partner with the company to help transition the PoC into a fully operational production system, providing employees with a reliable “single view of truth.” EK will support onboarding and training for the KM CoE, equipping its members to lead and champion KM efforts company-wide. Additionally, KM best practices and governance will be scaled across the broader organization, strengthening consistency and sustainability.

Looking ahead, EK will introduce advanced KMS capabilities such as natural language processing, AI-powered chatbot support, and personalized content recommendations. These capabilities will transform how employees access and apply knowledge and position the company and its employees for greater agility and innovation as a leader in the automotive industry.

Interested in maturing your organization’s knowledge management? Contact us today!

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The post Establishing a Scalable Knowledge Management Strategy and Solution Framework for a Leading Automotive Manufacturing Company: A Case Study appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

It is helpful to revisit the definition from the first part of this series for explicit knowledge before continuing the conversation:

Knowledge that has been made visible by recording it, or embedding it, into a variety of formats: written documents, multimedia, and the design of processes, procedures, or tools. Explicit knowledge can be an overarching term to refer to ‘content’ and ‘information.’

Why is Capturing Explicit Knowledge Challenging?

Among the many challenges that organizations face in properly capturing their explicit knowledge are:

• Current repositories lack a clear purpose statement, and therefore staff use whatever they find most convenient for themselves or their team, making collaboration and coordination across teams harder.
• Staff rely on email inboxes as personal repositories, making the correct and latest versions of documents difficult to track down.
• Knowledge is not structured or tagged in a consistent, predictable way, so people spend undue effort making sense of what they find.
• Knowledge is distributed across many systems, and there is neither a centralized point of access to it nor a complete view of all the relevant content that a user may need.

A Holistic Approach to Capturing and Transferring Explicit Knowledge

At EK, we leverage our People-Process-Content-Culture-Technology framework to approach challenges from a holistic perspective. Below, I share best practices for capturing and transferring explicit knowledge based on this framework.

People

Individuals need training and guidance for storing their knowledge in the correct place and in the appropriate format. As knowledge managers, it is up to us to help teams understand the value of consistently managing their knowledge and helping them adopt best practices. A common issue we come across is that individuals will use their email inboxes as their personal knowledge base, locking away and burying helpful conversations and documents. This is usually because they don’t know any better. Once people are offered guidance and compelling reasons to move their documents to a document management system and their conversations to a platform like Slack or Teams, then this knowledge becomes available to more people within their organization.

Process

Knowledge capture should be embedded as much as possible in the everyday business processes that teams engage in. When helping our clients articulate their KM strategy, their most common request is “don’t make me do extra work.” Knowledge management should not be something extra that employees must do. If we are able to capture knowledge as part of people’s natural ways of working, then we will engender greater adoption. For instance, leveraging meaningful metadata default values and auto-tagging features in taxonomy management systems will minimize the need for users to manually assign metadata to their documents.

Content

Much of the content in an organization is unstructured, which means that it lacks the metadata to describe and categorize it, making it more difficult to identify and manage. When knowledge is captured, it should be structured and categorized in a way that will make it easier to find and use. Developing a taxonomy to consistently tag explicit knowledge goes a long way in making knowledge more usable and findable, as well as laying the foundation for more advanced knowledge management capabilities in the future. Creating navigational structures and information architecture that is intuitive will also help people within your organization browse and sort through volumes of documents more quickly.

Culture

As mentioned above, people often develop bad habits in capturing and managing their knowledge. As part of organizational culture, leadership should not only establish incentives for people to capture their knowledge correctly, they should also set expectations and accountabilities for doing so. Furthermore, there should also be indicators to assess the extent to which teams and individuals are adhering to best practices, enabling the organization to adapt approaches if they aren’t.

Technology

Technology again becomes a key enabler for knowledge capture. Knowledge repositories should be searchable, support taxonomies, and offer features that would make it easy for individuals to ‘do the right thing.’ Organizations will want to consider introducing technologies that support KM into their technology stack if they don’t already have them, such as content and document management systems, taxonomy management, and in more advanced cases, knowledge graphs to provide that rich contextual view of a piece of knowledge.

Closing

Organizations create volumes of explicit knowledge as part of their daily activities. Capturing it, storing it, and then sharing it in a way that makes work easy for your teams can be very challenging. However, we are experts in providing organizations with tailored, holistic approaches to managing their explicit knowledge. If your organization needs help wrangling their knowledge, please contact us.

The post Knowledge Capture and Transfer Series – Part 3: Capturing Explicit Knowledge appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

• A significant cohort of long-tenured employees reaching retirement age.
• High turnover and the constant re-learning that occurs with each new generation of employees prevents the organization from being able to grow and scale the way they want to.
• A key team member is either absent or unavailable, and a critical initiative subsequently fails.

Enterprise Knowledge is often brought in at this stage. However, it is important for knowledge managers to help their organizations be more proactive about capturing and disseminating tacit knowledge before it’s too late. This is your institutional knowledge—the knowledge that your staff have of your operations, processes, products, and services. Knowledge that if someone left, and it was not documented, could interrupt operational effectiveness. Before continuing the conversation, it is helpful to revisit the definition for tacit knowledge from the first part of this blog series:

Tacit knowledge is highly internalized knowledge that is difficult to articulate, record, and disseminate. It can only be acquired through experience in a relevant context.

Why is Capturing Tacit Knowledge Challenging?

If we think about tacit knowledge, its very nature makes it difficult to capture:

• It resides in people’s heads.
• Experts must volunteer the knowledge they hold.
• Even if experts are willing to share their knowledge, an expert may not be able (and it may not be practical) to elicit every single detail and context of what they know.
• People’s memories are not perfect, and if someone is trying to convey something about an activity or event that happened even mere weeks ago, they may not fully remember it.

A Holistic Approach to Capturing and Transferring Tacit Knowledge

At EK, we leverage our People-Process-Content-Culture-Technology framework to approach challenges from a holistic perspective. Below, I share best practices for capturing and transferring tacit knowledge based on this framework.

People

Because tacit knowledge resides in people’s heads, this factor of our framework is critical to consider. To capture their knowledge, you have to make sure that you first have the right experts and that you are asking questions that will elicit the outcomes you seek. Especially when seeking knowledge related to complex activities, it is important to obtain multiple perspectives in order to get a more complete view of the desired knowledge. For example, you are facilitating a retrospective on a large international conference; to get a better understanding of what went well and what can be improved, you would need to include more than just participants. You may want to talk to representatives from the event sponsors, speakers and panelists, supporting staff and volunteers, suppliers, and so on.

Process

From a Process perspective, we have to make sure that we are capturing knowledge at the right time. We have written before about high value moments of knowledge capture. These are generally inflection points along organizational activities, like the end of a project, the realization of a milestone, a colleague’s departure, the close of a fiscal year, and so on. It is important to strike a balance between capturing knowledge while it is still fresh, while also giving people enough time to ‘digest’ or process what they may have experienced so that they can form additional insights.

Content

Content is the result of capturing and codifying an organization’s knowledge. It is important that content is structured in such a way that prompts employees to capture the relevant and important ‘knowledge nuggets’ that we seek. For instance, if we are looking for lessons learned after a project, we shouldn’t just offer employees a form with a single field that prompts them for singular successes and failures with the project. Instead, structure the lessons into meaningful metadata that can be later sorted and found. For instance, the type of project, relevant partners, unexpected events, resources that the team lacked, or the elements that contributed to making the project a success.

Culture

As I mentioned above, people have to volunteer their tacit knowledge. It is easy for them to do so in an environment that promotes knowledge sharing and establishes a psychological safe space where they can discuss difficult topics without judgment or repercussions. Unfortunately, this is not the case in all organizations. In this blog, our founder Zach Wahl offers advice on how to create a knowledge-sharing culture, which includes the use of meaningful rewards and recognition, coaching leaders into exemplifying knowledge-sharing behaviors, and creating both spaces and opportunities for people to exchange ideas.

Technology

As usual, we leave technology last because technology is an enabler and not a centerpiece. This factor is closely related to content because ideally, you would store the resulting content in a repository where knowledge can be preserved and managed so it can benefit the rest of the organization. Beyond having a repository to store the knowledge, organizations should also consider a search tool that allows employees to retrieve this knowledge in an easy and intuitive way.

Closing

Capturing tacit knowledge so it can be leveraged across the organization can be a challenging task. However, with a disciplined, systematic, and holistic approach, it can be accomplished. If you need guidance on creating value by managing your tacit knowledge, please contact us.

The post Knowledge Capture and Transfer Series – Part 2: Capturing Tacit Knowledge appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

The first thing we must acknowledge is that generally, organizations are trying to leverage knowledge that currently exists in two main forms: tacit and explicit. This has deep implications in how we approach knowledge and how we capture and manage it. The diagram below offers definitions for both forms of knowledge.

The challenge in capturing knowledge in each of these forms is different precisely because of their nature. Tacit knowledge generally resides within people’s heads, and it hasn’t been effectively documented. Common challenges related to tacit knowledge are the time it takes to find the experts with the right knowledge or the colleagues with the right experience. Furthermore, if the experts are unavailable, busy or on vacation, or have left the organization, their knowledge becomes inaccessible. Explicit knowledge, although documented, is often not placed in a location where it is easily discoverable, managed, or shared. Common challenges people face include spending excessive time going from repository to repository gathering the information needed to answer common requests, waiting for access, or having to spend significant effort comparing and cross-referencing multiple versions of files.

The upcoming blogs in this series discuss these challenges in detail and provide approaches and considerations for enabling organizations to capture and use their knowledge in both tacit and explicit forms. The rest of the blog series will break down approaches using EK’s People-Process-Content-Culture-Technology framework to demonstrate how to solve these challenges in a holistic manner.

If you would like to discuss your knowledge capture and management challenges in more detail, we will be happy to have a conversation. Contact us to get started.

The post Knowledge Capture and Transfer Series – Part 1: Getting Knowledge Capture and Transfer Right appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

The Solution

Piloting an approach with their IT Support team, EK implemented a Knowledge Management strategy in addition to a taxonomy and an enterprise search strategy aligned with the Bank’s needs and objectives. Using an agile approach, EK:

1. Inventoried information repositories, based on criticality and frequency of use;
2. Assessed and prioritized content by developing indicators to determine content’s value based on user needs and organizational goals, thus eliminating stale, inconsistent, or irrelevant information;
3. Implemented a taxonomy management tool and integrated the system with repositories to tag content, based on an EK-developed taxonomy; and
4. Revamped the search experience by implementing an open-source search engine and designing a new search interface and indexing strategy.

EK trained IT Support Managers, CSRs, and technical staff on how to conduct their roles with the new solutions and further scale their capabilities to benefit other business units in the bank. EK also implemented a KM Leadership team to ensure KM governance processes were in place and that the bank understood the newly developed strategy and how to communicate its value to executive leadership and their staff.

The EK Difference

EK was able to provide end-to-end KM services for the bank with expertise ranging from strategy and design to implementation and maintenance of the proposed solutions. EK utilized a variety of top-down and bottom-up approaches to assess the current inventory of repositories, define a content management strategy based on organizational and user needs, implement a taxonomy management system to properly tag and manage content, and align the system with an EK-designed taxonomy for consistent content management. EK partnered with the bank’s IT team to ensure a transparent and collaborative process, and to ensure that the bank’s staff received the proper and necessary training for effective maintenance of the new solutions. EK further enhanced the process of finding information by implementing a search engine, using in-house expertise, which also aligned with the content management strategy, taxonomy management solution, and the new taxonomy. EK was able to streamline the process of finding information due to the varied expertise in taxonomy design/implementation, content management processes, and enterprise search design and implementation.

The Results

Implementing the Knowledge Management strategy and technical solution resulted in the Federal Bank’s IT Support team being able to more quickly find information at the time of need. Key success outcomes of the engagement include:

• Cost Per Ticket was reduced
• Staff prefer the new search experience over SharePoint Online and DokuWiki
• Employees report increased confidence in search results
• Decreased time spent finding required information
• Increased ability for employees to discover content
• IT Support management understand their roles and responsibilities as they relate to governing the solution and guiding CSRs

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The post IT Support Implementation for a Large Federal Bank appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

The Solution

EK identified key organization roles and conducted interviews and focus groups with diverse members of the organization’s Workforce. EK Enterprise Learning experts also observed instructor-led courses, and analyzed additional instructional materials including job aids and performance support tools. The instructional content analysis transcended training documents and also included job descriptions, performance assessments, and policy documents. 

The result of this work was a Competency and Skills Gap Analysis and a Training Plan and Roadmap. A research-based competency framework provided the foundation for the organization of over 80 role-based, cross-functional competencies. 

EK then went further to develop the Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSAs) for competencies, accompanied by measurement criteria. KSAs, initially compiled from EK’s research, were successfully piloted by surveying Workforce members (including employees and their managers). Because managers have the high-level view of their teams’ efforts and achievements, they provided a holistic assessment of not only the effectiveness of the KSAs and measurement criteria, but the relevance to their teams. This provided valuable feedback for iterative improvements to KSAs. 

EK’s Enterprise Learning consultants then produced a Training Plan & Roadmap which provided a clear and actionable timeline for the application of the Learning Landscape and Competency and Skills Gap Analyses to transform instructional content and processes, and to leverage educational technology more effectively in order to upskill the organization’s Workforce.

The EK Difference

The EK team leverages over 30 years of Learning and Development experience to implement comprehensive organizational learning analyses and training solutions for organizations undergoing significant transformations. Enterprise Knowledge utilized its signature Enterprise Learning benchmarking tool to rapidly assess the efficacy of the organization’s learning landscape. The benchmark is used to examine five factors: an organization’s People, Processes, Instructional and Competency Frameworks, Educational Technology, and Culture. Under these analysis categories are over 30 total indicators each with their own success criteria. This benchmarking tool enables EK to rapidly understand the business drivers and organizational context which necessitate a training plan to close competency and skills gaps.

Armed with this knowledge, EK was able to identify the role-specific knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary for the organization’s Workforce to achieve its transformation. This holistic approach further enabled EK to be true partners to the organization as it implemented the Training Plan and Roadmap – putting the plan into action and achieving learning and business outcomes.

The Results

EK’s collaborative and transparent style of working resulted in positive reviews from faculty and instructional support staff all the way up to executive leadership. Our client went as far as to say, “We cannot do this without EK.” With the training plan’s implementation, the Human Resources Department will have standardized mechanisms for evaluating performance and a framework to strategically anticipate training needs. In addition to a competency-based framework, the training plan also provided sound technological guidance which will optimize the search experience of the organization’s learning management system and related technical ecosystem. Implementing this training plan will result in an upskilled workforce ready to deliver instruction in a virtual environment.

Developing a Competency-Based Training Plan for an Employee Transformation InitiativeDownload

The post Developing A Competency-Based Training Plan for an Employee Transformation Initiative appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Align KM With Your Organization’s Strategic Goals

At Enterprise Knowledge (EK), we make the distinction between KM Objectives and Business Objectives. Too often, when developing a case for an investment in KM, managers focus on outcomes that prove that KM strategies were effective in connecting people to the knowledge and information they needed to complete a task or make a decision, such as, improved findability, reuse, and retention of content. Although this approach can be useful in demonstrating the success of a KM effort, it is not sufficient nor as impactful as tying those goals to the overall strategic business objectives of the organization. Business cases for KM that make the connection between KM goals and specific business goals, such as increased productivity, market share, innovation, and revenue help to pique C-suite level interest in your ideas for leveraging KM as a means to achieving the objectives that matter most to the organization.

Whether on an annual basis or every three to five years, organizations typically identify the top initiatives that will not only help them survive in a rapidly changing economy, but ideally, gain the competitive advantage they need to stay on top. As these initiatives are being formulated, take note of what initiatives are gaining momentum and make connections with the individuals in your organization who are beginning to socialize them. It’s important to make KM a part of what will eventually become the organization’s priorities over the next few years. Whether it is an initiative focused on digital transformation, innovation that leads to new products and services, operational excellence, or a focus on developing human capital, help your organization’s influencers to see how KM can set the necessary foundation or even fast track the initiatives that will ultimately become the organization’s most critical investments. 

Present Costs and Opportunity Cost

In many cases, KM has the ability to sell itself because of the clear value it adds to any organization. The greater question is how to ensure an appropriate budget is allocated to the necessary efforts to mature an organization’s KM capabilities. KM involves an investment in the internal resources who will need to direct their efforts towards the development of a strategy, design, and/or implementation plan. These efforts could be a stand-alone, targeted KM solution, such as an enterprise taxonomy or search tool, or a more comprehensive and holistic set of KM solutions that complement one another. In addition to internal resources, you’ll want to consider how much it costs to invest in getting outside expertise from consultants who specialize in these niche fields, as well as the technology enhancements or additions necessary to help enable your KM solution(s). Having a realistic estimate of the capital and operational budget you’ll need to achieve your KM goals will help you to request the appropriate amounts so that you don’t fall short of following through on the promises you’ve made to your executive team. Make sure to get guidance from those who have either funded or led similar KM efforts.

In terms of opportunity costs, don’t forget to consider the benefits you are not gaining from failing to act more quickly in addressing your organization’s KM needs. My colleague, Lulit Tesfaye, shares critical insight into The Cost of Doing Nothing when it comes to KM. For every day that goes by that you do not begin designing and implementing KM solutions, you are wasting time and money resulting from people spending far too much time looking for information or duplicating content that already exists. Without proper KM programs, institutional knowledge easily slips out of the organization when someone leaves for another job or when they retire, which results in an inordinate amount of resources spent on training and upskilling new team members. The longer an organization waits to invest in KM efforts, the more time and resources it takes to resolve and correct the issues that have now become commonplace in your organization. Decision makers should understand that your sense of urgency is directly tied to how a lack of KM is affecting the organization’s bottom line. When presenting your business case, be sure to incorporate the opportunity cost of not taking action quickly when you present the Return on Investment (ROI) for the KM efforts you are proposing. 

Provide Expected Outcomes and Benefits

In Measuring the Success of KM Digital Transformation, I share various ways to measure the success of KM efforts. A common misstep people can make is confusing the solution itself with the outcome. Be sure to make that distinction clear. For example, successfully launching a centralized Knowledge Base is a milestone worth celebrating, but the Knowledge Base is the solution. Make sure to explore what that Knowledge Base is allowing you to do that you weren’t able to do prior to its implementation. In this example, the questions you should be asking include:

• Will people no longer need to go to multiple repositories to find the resources they need? 
• Will they be able to more quickly make decisions and provide internal and external  customers with the information they need to resolve issues and take action?
• Will they spend less time looking for information and more time being productive?

By clearly outlining what people will be able to do differently as a result of your solutions, you will be able to help shed light on why KM is worth the investment. Be prepared to discuss the specific stakeholder groups in and outside of your organization and have clear explanations of what’s in it for them. Perhaps, the business development department will have better access to past proposals to help close deals faster or your customer service team will be able to increase satisfaction ratings and decrease the time it takes to close tickets. Not only does articulating the benefits of KM help you to gain buy-in for your proposed solution(s), it also helps to define the ways in which you will measure whether or not you achieved your expected outcomes.

Define How You’ll Measure Benefits Over Time

Beyond knowing what to measure, you should also think about how you will measure success. Most KM technology, including content repositories, search engines, and collaboration tools make it easy to natively track user analytics, but you’ll want to design your proposed KM Analytics Plan to produce the necessary outputs you need to report out on your progress. Oftentimes a dashboard that centralizes analytics pulled from various sources can help to tell a compelling story of how your KM efforts are moving the needle in terms of helping your organization achieve its goals. A few things to consider:

• What will you measure?
• How often will you measure?
• Are there ways to automate analytics capture and consolidation?
• What information do you want to present in your dashboard?
• Who will be responsible for ensuring that the inputs are accurate and reliable? Who will be responsible for designing and maintaining your KM Analytics dashboard?

To supplement quantitative results, also consider measuring qualitative feedback using employee surveys conducted either electronically or via interviews and focus groups. This will give you a full picture of the impact your KM efforts are having on the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that matter to your organization.

Support Your Case With Strategies for Success 

It’s not enough to articulate what your proposed KM solutions are and how they will benefit the organization. You’ll want to strengthen your business case by explaining the methodologies you’ll be applying in order to increase adoption of the new KM technology or ways of working. In my Agile, Design Thinking, and Change Management course, we explore tools, methods, and techniques for avoiding the common mistakes that cause KM projects to fail. These strategies include:

• Taking an Agile approach so that you’re delivering value to the organization within weeks and months rather than years.
• Using Design Thinking principles to prioritize the challenges you focus on and design your solutions in an innovative way that takes into account the experience of those who will ultimately benefit from them.
• Implementing an Integrated Change Management Plan to decrease resistance to change and increase the likelihood that people adjust to the changes you’re introducing.

What these disciplines have in common is that they take into account input and feedback from  the various individuals who should be involved throughout the process of planning, implementing, and maintaining your KM solutions. Incorporating these methodologies for success in your business case will help you to gain the trust and confidence you need from decision makers.

Present Investment Options 

Given that there is no silver bullet for KM, it can often be quite an investment to implement the foundational elements of KM along with all of the KM solutions that build on top of them to further mature your KM capabilities. Keep in mind that there is no one technology or solution that fixes all of the challenges that can be solved with KM, so your decision makers may experience sticker shock when they see how much KM costs over time. The key point to remember is that KM doesn’t necessarily require one large investment. You can offer various options for investing in KM that allow for smaller investments over time as you begin to reap the benefits of your initial investment. For example, rather than investing in a multi-year, multi-million dollar KM initiative, you can provide options for pilot projects that introduce Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) or Proofs of Concepts (PoCs) of the various KM solutions you’re proposing. It’s always good to present options to try or sample before you buy. Alternatively, you want to take into consideration the economies of scale that can be gained from taking a holistic approach to KM and investing in comprehensive effort. Be sure to lay out all of these options and share the pros and cons of choosing one over the other.

Provide Case Studies and Benchmarks

Lastly, KM sounds great in theory, but without roots in practical applications of KM principles, methods, and tools, KM projects can fail because they are too abstract or conceptual in nature. By connecting with organizations who have had similar experiences and successes with KM projects and presenting those stories to your senior managers and executives, you are able to strengthen your case for investing in something that has been proven to work in a similar organization.  If you need some starting points, check out the Case Studies and Success Stories we have on our site. Keep in mind, however, that although there are organizations that are more successful in reaping the benefits of KM, there is no single organization that is the benchmark for all things KM-related. Be specific in presenting case studies in a targeted way so that you do not set unrealistic expectations regarding your KM solutions. Take the time to speak to KM practitioners regarding their lessons learned because more often than not, the road to these successes were paved with obstacles and unexpected circumstances that were overcome. 

Conclusion

Knowledge Management is not a trend, buzz word, or fad. Although, in its history, it may have been associated with failed attempts at harnessing institutional knowledge, it is and always will be a critical element to any organization’s success. Whether you call it “KM” or not, your organization needs a strategy and plan for connecting people to the knowledge and information they need to do their job and it’s up to you to develop a case for why. If you need help developing your business case, Contact Us at Enterprise Knowledge. We’re ready to help!

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You may have picked up a few new hobbies or pursuits during the COVID-19 pandemic, but have you done anything to nurture your existing professional interests and areas of expertise? A community of practice (CoP) provides an excellent opportunity to cultivate these interests while engaging with coworkers whom you probably haven’t had a chance to interact with very much over the last several months. This method of knowledge building is even more valuable while we’re isolated in our homes, craving social interaction. If you’re not familiar with the term, a community of practice is an organized group of people with a common professional interest who meet regularly to learn from each other through sharing ideas, experiences, and best practices. Unlike a “community of learning” which is focused on helping people learn new concepts, communities of practice help people develop proficiencies in fields in which they are already familiar.

Communities of practice are a great way to build morale and generate excitement around shared competencies, but it can be difficult to facilitate remote CoPs in a world where many of us are on our computers all day and experiencing very real video call fatigue. In this blog post, I will demonstrate the importance of CoPs in the context of KM and provide some tips on how you can cultivate and maintain communities of practice within your organization to motivate your colleagues to take a proactive approach to professional development and innovation in a time when employee engagement, skill building, and social interaction can be challenging.

Why Communities of Practice are Important for Knowledge Management

Communities of practice go hand-in-hand with good knowledge management. Given that internal knowledge is a company’s competitive advantage, CoPs are effective mechanisms for capturing and sharing information across the organization. They provide employees with opportunities to collaborate, capture, and share knowledge that can improve performance and efficiency at an organizational level while also reducing duplication of work. As a result, employees will feel empowered to be more innovative, promote best practices, and find greater satisfaction in their jobs. The more CoPs are used, the more they aid in tacit knowledge capture. As employees participate in communities of practice through various communication technologies, they are essentially transferring their tacit knowledge into a digital form where it can be leveraged by current and future employees. This ability to capture and share the experience and expertise of an organization’s individuals is a key element of KM maturity.

How to Create Sustainable Communities of Practice

If you are contemplating starting a new CoP within your organization, it’s important to keep the following in mind to ensure that you are creating something that will be beneficial to your community. Here are some suggestions for structuring a new CoP to set it up for success.

• Create value: People join communities of practice because they are passionate about a particular technical area or business domain. They are typically already fairly knowledgeable in this subject area so it is important to provide in-depth information or unique perspectives and methodology that will help individuals do their jobs better and distinguish themselves in the field.
• Identify and incorporate your organization’s most recognized experts: Include individuals within your organization known for their expertise in the early stages of CoP development and pre-populate great knowledge and discussions before launch. We often refer to this as seeding content within CoPs. This will evoke interest and drive adoption by demonstrating to participants how CoPs might benefit their professional development.
• Define roles and objectives: If you want the CoP to be a sustainable entity, create a guiding strategy and get clear on how the group will be managed. Consider what roles you need and who will serve in them, and what principles will guide decision-making around content that is shared. Also, set up a schedule with regular meetings and create a calendar of events for participants. Set clear expectations for participation and discuss what success as a community looks like for the group.
• Establish trust and transparency: Don’t make it all about business! Provide participants with the opportunity to converse casually. If the group consists of mostly new faces, find ways to make connections amongst members on a more personal level. Allow for unstructured time on the agenda and create an environment where people feel comfortable asking questions, being vulnerable, and taking risks. Consider keeping the CoP closed from management to foster an environment where employees can openly speak about problems and knowledge gaps.
• Make it easy for people to communicate with each other: Create a centralized, digital location to access and share information (if one doesn’t already exist), while making it easy for community members to engage. It is especially important to facilitate connections across boundaries, given that people are geographically dispersed due to the pandemic. As EK’s CEO, Zach Wahl, has previously mentioned, it is important to leverage frequently used communication channels. As it becomes easier to share information, levels of participation and engagement will increase. Ensure that technology supports the community but that it does not define the community. In other words, the digital platform is one part but there should also be face-to-face conversations (when feasible), virtual meetings, and other synchronous activities and gatherings. Stick to whatever platform your company uses for meetings, but find other ways to create engaging content through breakout rooms or complementary tools.

How to Maintain Communities of Practice

Once you have an established structure in place that provides a safe space where people feel comfortable sharing experiences and ideas, you must continue to provide value to keep members engaged. By inviting unique perspectives to contribute to the discussion and soliciting feedback from participants, members will have actionable ways to contribute, become invested in the continued success of the CoP, and remain active in the community. Below are a few examples of ways that you can keep your members engaged and provide enduring professional enrichment.

• Incorporate new, diverse perspectives: Deliver compelling content that will continue to draw people back. Because CoPs are comprised of experts and experienced professionals, if you’re not providing new and thought-provoking ideas, your members will become bored and eventually drop off. This can be done by discussing controversial topics, encouraging vulnerability, and sharing stories of failure from which to reflect and grow.
• Continue to adapt and refine: If you’re noticing a decline in participation, speak with members of the group and find out ways to improve or pivot in order to bring people back and draw in new members. Aim to cover topics that meet at least 80% of your members’ needs to ensure that content is relevant to your CoP. Even if your audience participation is great, try to figure out what is drawing people in and continue to replicate and refine those aspects.
• Make it fun!: Make meetings and events interactive and dynamic. One of the best virtual meetings I’ve attended was a mix of presentations and a few “breaks” where we had the chance to chat for 10 minutes with other attendees one-on-one. It split up what could have been a rather boring presentation and allowed participants to network and socialize.
• Stay engaged in-between meetings. Use social media and online forums to your advantage. Have a closed channel dedicated to sharing articles and educational resources amongst the CoP to maintain a safe space but also share ideas with a wider audience via Twitter and LinkedIn to gain outside perspectives and grow your network.

As you consider how to structure and grow communities of practice within your organization, these tips will provide guidance to facilitate effective and sustainable knowledge transfer. CoPs can be an incredibly powerful tool to promote collaborative learning while enriching knowledge management across your organization. 

Looking to incorporate communities of practice into your organization? Contact us at Enterprise Knowledge for support!

The post Enriching Knowledge Management Through Cultivating Communities of Practice appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

The post Webinar: Building a Connected Search Experience: Bringing KM and AI Together to Fuel Findability appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

With the current global COVID-19 pandemic, companies big and small, global and local, have found themselves in a much different reality and have been forced into remote work situations. Knowledge Management, when well-designed and implemented, can play a major role in helping an organization maintain the three c’s of organizational health: connections, collaboration, and culture.

In this webinar, Zach Wahl and Mary Little will discuss how KM supports effective remote work, and will offer recommendations for how organizations can improve their KM and remote work immediately.

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