What is a Knowledge Management System??
Knowledge management is defined by IBM as…
Knowledge management (KM) is the process of identifying, organizing, storing and disseminating information within an organization.
What does this mean to you? It means that important information within your business, team, and personal life is organized and stored outside of your own brain. This allows for referencing information and being able to think more clearly day-to-day.
You’re probably doing at least some of this already with some processes and documentation; I’d bet you have a job description of a role you’re hiring for posted, or maybe you have a company handbook with lots of policies in place.
What if we could store more information?
What if you could store more information than just the core business policies? What if you had a place that you could train from that would give reliable results no matter who was to see it?
When you have meetings throughout the week, where does that information end up? How easy is it for OTHERS to reference and follow?
We take notes all the time, but if we had a system in place that would standardize the information and expectations, this would improve efficiency for referencing that information.
Notion.so, OneNote, Microsoft Loop, SharePoint, etc.
These are all types of knowledge management tools that you can use to make information more available for your team (and yourself… see Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), Tiago Forte has a nice article for this)
Each of these tools offer a structure and format for taking in information and referencing it later. The trick is how to use this to your advantage and ensure that you talk about the information to your team.
As mentioned in ITILv4, to increase impact, increase visibility. This means you have to talk about it and train/learn where to find the information that is stored here.
What do I put in this knowledge management tool?
ANYTHING and EVERYTHING that is important to your team/business. Personally, I use this for my daily random notes or issues that come up and I can’t take care of them right then. This is my reference guide when I DO end up having time to sit down and plan something out.
I’m tracking my standard operating procedures, policies, and technical manuals all within Notion. I also will be putting a systematic ‘notes inbox’ for meeting discussions that anyone could add to. This allows ideas to freely be captured as they come up instead of forcing them during the ‘anyone have anything’ part of the meeting.
I would strongly encourage checklists, tech sheets, archived assets, and historical data to be stored here. For many of you, this is probably broken up between a PSA, UMM (unified management and monitoring) tool, and other applications. However, ensure that there’s always some pointers to each system if the information overlaps. Use as many backlinks as possible to reduce confusion.
Sorry for the long winded version this week, I’m writing this late at night as I got caught up with personal issues this week.
Stay tuned for more team collaboration tips and tricks to improve your business and team.