People say that knowledge is power, but that adage is far more than an easy axiom. It’s also a bedrock truth. Perhaps no one knows that better than business leaders and decision-makers, those who deal every day with the management of knowledge.

The simple reality is that knowledge is the grist that keeps the wheels of your business turning. Lack of knowledge can lead to devastating errors, misjudgments, and mismanagement. Conversely, the theft of sensitive information can destroy your company’s reputation and threaten its very survival.

What this means, ultimately, is that knowledge management is about far more than developing sound operating practices, promoting efficiency and productivity, or galvanizing growth and profitability. Rather, the effective control of information is also an aspect of risk reduction. Indeed, risk mitigation may well be the most important, if frequently overlooked, attribute of knowledge management.

Connecting Knowledge Management and Risk Mitigation

Ours truly is the age of information. The success of any modern enterprise, regardless of the industry, directly and inextricably links to the production and flow of knowledge. Thus, the principal form of currency in modern business isn’t money — it’s information.

Just as you would safeguard your financial assets as a function of your risk management processes, so too must you safeguard the creation and circulation of knowledge within your organization if you intend to effectively mitigate the risks to which your organization is exposed.

The Rise of 5G, the IoT, and Smart Tech

Now more than ever, much of the work people do is performed remotely, via smartphones, tablets, and other connected devices linked to the Internet of Things (IoT). These technologies give workers unprecedented power to create, access, and disseminate knowledge whenever they need it and wherever they may be.

This on-demand access to information not only helps to support efficient workflow, but it reduces the risk of work stoppages, delays, or operational errors. For example, IoT devices can be used by farmers to monitor growing conditions in real-time, shippers to track shipments worldwide, and warehouse and inventory managers to continuously assess and regulate product and supply stocks, transport, and storage. Ultimately, this reduces operational risks relating to common threats such as lower-than-expected crop yields, shipment delays, and inventory mismanagement.

Best of all, the extraordinary speed of information flow promises only to increase as technology advances and the 5G network expands worldwide. Indeed, the proliferation of 5G is expected to bridge the digital divide, connecting once inaccessible spaces to the world wide web while offering unprecedented speed and security.

This means that not only will knowledge flow faster, more freely, and more securely around the world, but also that business leaders worldwide will have more power than ever before to reduce their strategic, financial, regulatory, and operational risks. And such risk avoidance not only benefits the organization, but also employees, consumers, and local, national, and global economies in general.

Curtailing Information Flow

As critical as the dissemination of knowledge may be to productivity, efficiency, and strategy, there are, of course, a myriad of reasons why information access is a threat. Some data simply are not appropriate for public consumption, and the failure to protect such sensitive information can have profound consequences for your company.

Healthcare organizations that fail to secure patients’ medical information, for instance, may face costly lawsuits and severe damage to their reputation. Under extreme conditions, they may even be subject to compulsory shutdown by regulators.

For this reason, it is imperative that business leaders prioritize not only the production of knowledge but also the protection of it. Unfortunately, this is not always an easy proposition. For example, you likely already have a clear and rigorous policy for shredding documents containing sensitive information, such as financial or medical records.

However, information leaks can come from even the most seemingly innocuous sources. For instance, bad actors may be able to use something as simple as a birthday card to begin gathering the personally identifiable information (names, birth dates, relatives’ names, etc.) they need to hack company accounts.

This is why, when it comes to knowledge management, it’s probably not possible to be too proactive. In other words, sweat the small stuff. Install virtual private networks (VPN), firewalls, and other advanced security technologies and ensure they’re always updated. Engage in rigorous and ongoing information security training for all employees and partners and provide timely security alerts. Institute policies for destroying all potentially harmful information, no matter how seemingly innocuous.

This should also include, for example, securing all devices potentially containing work product, and ensuring that devices no longer in use are destroyed rather than simply wiped or scrubbed. Even common office equipment such as printers and scanners can retain sensitive information and, thus, should also be professionally destroyed.

The Takeaway

Knowledge management is about far more than using information to optimize operations and drive profitability. Knowledge management is also likely your best weapon against risk. With the appropriate technology, sound information production and dissemination practices, and rigorous data security, you can safeguard your company against the myriad risks that threaten it.

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Knowledge management (KM) activities include knowledge creation, editing, capturing, assembling, sharing, integration, advantage, and exploitation ranging from acquiring new knowledge to exploitation. Like other functions, KM is an important branch and plays a critical difference factor in the entire search process for hiring industries.

With continued demand growth (3.6% YoY), the staffing industry must adopt KM to succeed.

SMART Recruiting

Knowledge management improves the ability of organizations to solve problems better, adapt, adapt to changing business needs, and adapt to disruptive changes.

Smart Recruiting is a technology that disrupts the hiring industry. Smart placement adheres to the most successful recruitment objectives, in line with business objectives, in general - these are SMART objectives. They are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based objectives provide clear goals and action plans.

In recent years there has been a significant increase in potential job candidates and hence the costs associated with their appointment. This is mainly due to both the complex talent of the employees and the increased geographical flexibility.

The need for talent recruitment has grown so much that today we need to adopt an ingenious, intelligent, automated applicant tracking system. Find savvy recruiters in growth companies and high-caliber talent looking to join them.

Some initiatives have significantly improved the situation by developing automated solutions to make the e-recruitment process more efficient. Traditional solutions have limitations in handling semantic relationships properly. However, semantic processing, a sub-discipline of knowledge management, bridges this gap.

Knowledge Management In HR

The HRM (Human Resource Management) system uses basic information related to candidates and hiring staff. Knowledge management, in general, is an essential tool for any business that wants to increase its base and market share.

From an HR perspective, KM collects and stores the knowledge of employees, which is why companies are giving them success so far. In addition, sharing this information across the organization provides employees with insights into past approaches that improve performance or suggest new policies.

One of the significant benefits of HR Knowledge Management is that employees can find and access the information they need without the help of HR. The exchange of information is also managed by the entry-level. Based on the users' role, the staff members' access privileges reveal accessible information to the concerned employees.

Benefits of KM in Human Resources

The ultimate goal of knowledge management in decision making at a strategic, innovative, and operational level is to take more awareness steps toward business success.

Some of the additional benefits can be calculated as mentioned below:

Benefits to in-house HR processes

• Single Source - A centralized space for information is assigned when creating a knowledge management system that remains available and constantly updates as employee records change. This way, you bridge the information gap, your employees may not be able to fill it alone, and you will be free from information loss.
• Speed up Onboarding - One of the main objectives of the staff onboarding process is to create an alignment between your new hire and your organization. On the one hand, your new employee needs to clearly understand their role in your company and what they are responsible for. Employers also get feedback from new hires to help improve the process. 
• With a proper knowledge base in artificial intelligence, the entire onboarding process can be expedited, as they provide a structured walk-through of your system and procedures, making that part easier. With process-based knowledge management software, you can start anew from any process, even providing reference help and videos at each workflow stage.
• Successful revolution - When you prioritize knowledge management, it significantly increases your chances of achieving successful innovation. An integral part of knowledge management that drives innovation is gaining knowledge from external sources - market, competitors, and industry leaders. With market insights at your fingertips, you can stay on top of change, quickly identify and accept trends, make intelligent decisions, and improve your organization's business performance.
• Team Collaboration - Proper knowledge management will also contribute to staying aligned with company values, results-based outlooks, and collaborative tactics. Employees in your organization may be job-specific or wear multiple hats. In both cases, the knowledge management system and the process will help your employees - and the company - gain greater transparency about what knowledge is available and lead to better team productivity.

Benefits to Staffing Agencies

Market intelligence is critical to ensure that executive search consultants make the right decisions and provide clients with informative advice, knowledge, and talent.

Some of the significant benefits are highlighted as follows:

• Faster turnaround - As market data increases every year, traditional research methods no longer cope with it. The hiring industry is taking on a new shape driven by disruptive technology, forcing a disrupted executive search market. They work in the background to systematically gather intelligence from talent data sources and build KM around them to meet client needs.
• Aspects of KM, sharing, reuse of knowledge, and innovation significantly reduce the time to deliver talent resources to the customer. This translates into increased win rates, add-on businesses, and new contracts.
• Deliver Hiring Solution - Knowledge Management for Recruitment Agency helps to create KM integrated system that provides end-to-end hiring solutions. Knowledge can be stored and refined in the HR Knowledge Base, which helps make decisions on fast and good work. Criteria-based evaluation of suitable candidates is done faster and more accurately.
• Effective Executive Search - Market knowledge is the main differentiator. The recruiting consultant or talent acquisition team knows the role, organization, and industry trend to identify the best-fit candidate. Having the KM platform facilitates quick access for background checks, screening, and client verification.
• Analytics with Information pool - When you need to respond to customers, solve problems, analyze trends, evaluate markets, benchmark against peers, understand competition, create new offers, formulate policies, and think critically, you usually look for information and resources to support these activities. 

Takeaway

A Strong Knowledge Management Foundation is necessary to succeed in any Conversational Recruiting Strategy. Knowledge management is essential for enhancing and improving performance in an organization. Knowledge base management for recruiting agencies helps create effective solutions and make faster and more effective decisions in the recruitment process. Developing knowledge management for staffing agencies makes talent acquisition goals accurate and quicker.

Evolution of Knowledge Management 

The fast-paced evolution of our globally interconnected economy necessitates the development of knowledge capabilities as a corporate imperative. The forebears of knowledge management devised helpful tools and methods. What they discovered is currently being used in various new business areas. 

According to the original principle of knowledge management, if knowledge is an organization's most important resource, it should be exploited and made more productive. This is still true today. However, the buzz around Knowledge management has exploded in recent years, as have its applications.

Businesses rely on a dependable knowledge management system for efficient information sharing and internal processes.

What is knowledge management?

Knowledge management is the process of gathering, storing, organizing, and disseminating information within a company. Knowledge is stored in your company's files, documents, guidelines, databases, reports, and in your employees' heads.

Leaders must allow knowledge to flow dynamically and effortlessly across all activities and departments inside the organization in a quickly shifting business landscape where taking full use of information is critical to staying competitive. The volume of unstructured data generated every day and locked away in siloed applications is the most significant difficulty in knowledge management. Emerging AI technologies will play an important role, such as natural language processing and natural language production.

These systems can categorize and organize data across several platforms, removing significant hurdles to leveraging knowledge developed within companies.

1 - Applications of AI in Knowledge Management

Unstructured content makes up more than 80% of enterprise information. Unlike structured data formats, analyzing and extracting valuable information from unstructured data such as memos, emails, text documents, films, and other forms of unstructured data. And this information is quite beneficial in the corporate world.

Knowledge mining is a new AI-driven idea that entails combining several intelligent services to quickly study data, uncover hidden insights, and discover linkages at scale. Knowledge workers will be able to access unstructured data more efficiently and make better business judgments due to this.      

2 - Chatbots powered by Knowledge Management – Knowledge bots

A knowledge bot can be built to deliver information on any topic that knowledge workers are interested in. A knowledgebot, for example, can respond to inquiries such as "Who is the senior manager for Knowmax?" "How do I upgrade my operating system?" or "What is Robin's email address?" Employees can also utilize the bot to retrieve documents from the knowledge management system, such as "Get me the sales report for 2017" or "Send me the status report for project A," etc. 

Employees can use a chatbot or a voice bot to have natural language discussions and access information via text or speech.

These bots will work as personal assistants on your intranet and in messaging apps like Teams, Skype For Business, and Skype.

3 - Quick access to personalized information with the help of a Semantic search

Cognitive enterprise search is a critical component of current information management systems and is essential forproviding individualized search experiences.

For example, a simple search on the firm's "Rebranding Directors" should not only return information on therelevant people in the company, but it should also tailor the results depending on the user's profile, such as location, geography, interests, work role, etc. Furthermore, the search should consider the language requirements of personnel all around the world.

4 - Omnichannel approach

All intranet packages will need flexibleand diversified capabilities that allow for easy cooperation. Everything elseis secondary to modern employees' preference for convenience and accessibility.

As a result, increased compatibility of intranet and knowledge base management technologies with a mobile interface are anticipated to emerge as an important knowledge management trend.

The goal is to provide employees with all the necessary tools at their fingertips, regardless of where they work.

Employees must juggle between applications,programs, and tools outside of the knowledge management system for various tasks such as project management, communication, and content creation, among others. 

The workplace apps and the knowledge management system can be brought together under one integrated digital workplace suite using intranet software. Getting into multiple programs and switching between them will be less of a challenge for an employee. 

5 - Cloud-based technologies

The software as a service (SaaS) paradigm is gaining traction in the digital workplace. Intranets with knowledge management systems are increasingly being sold as an Intranet-as-a-Service model. 

This is an appealing alternative for businesses that want flexibility and a cloud-based monthly subscription plan over a hefty upfront expenditure. This trend is also fuelled by an increased need to access information from any location.

Conclusion 

Employees will be able to access the knowledge management system more quickly and effectively if the user interface (UI) is well-designed. The staff's ability to adapt to the system is directly influenced by what they see on the screen. As a result, the backbone of an effective knowledge management system must be an appealing, compact, and adaptable interface. 

In an ever-changing business world, knowledge is power, and when effectively tapped, it allows businesses to stay relevant and innovate. A modern knowledge management system makes use of artificial intelligence (AI) to acquire, organize, and distribute business data efficiently.

Lastly, as you prepare to capitalize on these new trends, you might be tempted to overdo and choose the tools, not in line with your organization's processes. Hence, it is more important to monitor these efforts in a timely fashion.

Knowledge Management practices can be highly improved through supporting work culture advance minority communities.

Have you been in a team meeting where the leader expects everyone to come on time and has rolled out the agenda before the meeting to ensure he is understood? We all want to be heard. As the meeting starts the leader sets up his slides and begins the session pointing at each slide in the line of sight with his joystick hoping that he has the viewers’ attention. Its break time and during this time he connects with a few individuals seeking feedback about the session and connecting it to their day as they smell the coffee. As the session begins there are breakout rooms and slowly it is time for activities. This is when the audience really gets a taste of what they have grasped as there is one person who clearly comes out a leader. Soon it's time for the day to end and the leader asks the team 'So what did you like?' and rolls out the feedback forms with the hope that his knowledge truly connected and touched a chord that wants the audience to say 'I learned more than I expected.'
So, was the training truly effective?

Knowledge Management is a touchy topic - some want it to progress because they want to be heard and recognized, and others want it in-sight so their teams can create & share valuable information that can be traced. However, when teams see individuals walk out the door and get a feel (touch) of their own culture of not creating a safe workplace where knowledge can be shared freely, is where the real problem lies. We need to ensure that we serve KM according to the taste of our customers, partners, teams, and most important have a taste for it ourselves when building an inclusive culture.

Everyone is talking about workplace diversity and it is important for driving business. However, few understand the right techniques.  Let me explore below:

1. know-what (accessibility v/s inclusive design): Persons with disabilities are experts in adapting to their surroundings. Ever imagine the HR orientation and introducing a person with visual impairment to his surroundings? Most of the time we provide accessibility by giving a larger system or software. Truly however, we are called to apply instructive design principles, then we can ensure we 'solve for one and extend to many'. Recognizing exclusion is more important than accepting inclusion, and recognizing our own biases helps us seek out new ideas to truly create a diverse workplace.

2. know-when (inclusive best practices within KM teams): Many times we know that inclusive workplaces are the key to ensuring we bring these diverse ideas to the workplace. We want teams to start engaging in creative thinking and engage to create new work practices. However, we fail to integrate these best practices into designing our workplace policies and in-time training practices remain the same. It is important we recognize that having diversity in the KM team can also encourage sustenance, as quite often these individuals themselves would evolve as leaders and recognize the need.

3. know-how (it all starts with inclusion hires doing KM): There are so many levers we use to ensure our users are adopting KM practices; knowledge is flowing through the organization, and is helpful to those who need it at the right time and the right place. However, can we guarantee it is helping the right person all the time? Organizations that invest in diversity work practices like having team leads with hearing impairment, pair up with interpreter's and conduct technical courses to the larger team help them develop empathy. This ensures we are open to learning from people with a broad range of perspectives that help us create products designed for the larger user community, including people with hearing, visual, and other kinds of impairment.

4. know-why: Once KM impacts innovation and is acknowledged and sustained, it becomes a lever for business change. Leaders start measuring it and investing in sharing a narrative of how it has impacted business. However, culture is contrary to inclusion as it involves changing mindsets, having those tough conversations with leaders who do not want to practice hiring persons with disabilities, coaching team members who truly bring diverse viewpoints and growing them as leaders. It is important we identify leaders who can be a part of the boardroom and have these conversations to truly ensure we are advancing our community as a diverse workforce.

5. care-why: Having built a truly inclusive knowledge management ecosystem as leaders, we want to define the right metrics and measure the business value. Many times this extends to our customers, and we need to solicit truly how our workplace practices impacted through KM is making their products, culture and practices incrementally improve.

In-Summary: If we ‘care-why’ to create long term value for our clients but do not recognize that inclusion starts with seeking out new ideas to truly create a diverse workplace, we are missing true business value. We need to align our workplace and recognize through the right KM practices that we can advance our workforce to develop empathy, ideas, and build products that are aligned to inclusive design. In time the incremental value we create for our customers alike would help us gain market share of a larger community that would improve our own work practice culture.

There is no innovation without creative ideas, would you agree? I am sure all of us agree that we have built creative designs in our childhood and learnt from others teaming to create art forms that were unique, just like us. Growing up we found creativity in fun things, and we enjoyed interacting with likeminded beings based on our human-centric abilities, which ensured we were motivated. On the contrary, our behaviors were also conditioned to rule-based practices which society 'norming' instituted. So, we lost creativity to innovate or did we not?

Today, the question more relevant to innovation is 'how does
one develop creativity?' We can improve our creativity through coming together and engaging in stimulating creative abilities. This leads to innovation as we train ourselves to have common beliefs and come together in the creation of new relationships, that seemed unconnected before, and now create knowledge components. So, can knowledge management foster innovation?

Today, there are many experts who relate Creative KM to Technology, and this has resulted in practices such as Gamification, that is related to incentivizing users to contribute their critical knowledge in return for reward and recognition. This in-turn has ensures a culture setting where teams come forward to contribute their critical knowledge. Then where is the problem?  We need to ensure there is a sustainable advantage in the long-term merits and combining it with people practices. Let us explore what some of them are...

In the above graphic are few proven methods

• KM Cricket is a teaming concept where project-based teams working for a client come together and practice bi-weekly a fun-based activity that encourages sharing knowledge that is common to both but practiced differently. It is a simple Q&A session where there are two teams, and each gets to ask the other frequent questions around a technology, product, or customer that associates both teams to learn from each other. This culture building technique establishes trust and makes it a 'win-win' to move from internal awareness to building a learning capacity.
• A KM Cafe is a wonderful way to move towards building relationships and ensure we build people's motivation to come together to learn from each other, share their experiences, and finally relate to each other. The outcome of the exercise is to synthesize informal learnings helping the individual advance from their own trust-based corner to coming together in creative workspaces to co-innovate.
• KM Folklore stories are leaders speaking about their own journeys and sharing their motivations, fears, behaviors, and a lot more that helped them advance. It helps the audience to be encouraged and most of the times through these 'folklore stories' makes leaders more approachable to ensure better teaming.
• Mind Maps are a wonderful way to get teams together and help them ideate around key organization themes such as achieving business excellence, building customer loyalty, improving revenue and many other organizational tenets. It can also be linked with tools that teams are using like 'idea portals', 'sprint boards' and other agile practices to ensure an innovation journey as individual teams.
• Chat Bots are AI based engines that users find more personalized. If one can link this to Communities of Practice and ensure there are experts who are also documenting the questions that the user's rate as Satisfactory or below, then this knowledge base becomes a rich source of innovation.

If we focus on the teaming aspect at a project and organizational level we can encourage culture building. There is a still the individual need of motivating users to align to the Innovation Strategy and ensure their intrinsic need is met, and this is where we need to create 'the reading library of km' - a space for users to have access to exploring project briefs, lessons learnt, best practices and most important, access to work alongside experts to hone their skills.

In-Summary: Innovation starts with Creative KM as it helps innovators come together and develop organization culture. However, it is important we recognize that it begins with not just the right 'Toolsets' but has to be combined with the right 'Mindsets' for individuals to come together as teams in sense-making to learn and co-innovate. Finally, we need to elevate the right 'Skillsets' and ensure users feel motivates, have fun and practice Creative KM that help in achieving the organization Innovation Strategy.