In a rapidly evolving world, we must align with modern digital approaches like VR (Virtual Reality), Big Data, and AI to gain and maintain a competitive advantage. The education sector embraces knowledge management by CoPs (Communities of practice)
to keep abreast with these technological advancements.

Knowledge management is a term that refers to the application of the latest technologies to drive results for organizations like universities. Hence, Communities of Practice proffers an adaptive and evolving avenue for diligent teachers and students to gather together and explore innovative and creative ways to improve the teaching and learning experience.

Systems and Technologies of CoPs

Various technologies and systems are available that assist in Communities of Practice. Non-technological tools are mostly hardware-based, while advanced technologies utilize software systems. Both systems support knowledge collection, processing, and storage. And unite all information into a single piece to share on digital tools that provide and maintain the requirements for networking, communication, collaboration, and socialization.

Various real-time synchronous and interactive tools like web conferencing, audio meetings, instant messaging, chat, instant messaging, and white-boarding provide innovative platforms for communication. Other than synchronous tools, many asynchronous tools like discussion boards, website links, polls, surveys, and group announcements are also available. Both mechanisms gather data and assist in the practice of CoPs in universities.

Knowledge Management and Communities of Practice in Universities

Communities of Practice is a functional knowledge management (KM) practice that aids sharing of valuable knowledge in universities and other educational institutions. Most information in the education sphere is tacit and is tough to enunciate. CoPs act as a carrier for knowledge creation and sharing. The objective of CoP is to develop, extend, and swap useful information among concerned authorities and administration to devise an effective mechanism for educators. 

Due to the compelling and productive outcomes of Communities of Practice in universities, it has become a strategic and expanding tool for crafting the most effective teaching methodologies and learning knowledge. Hence, many academic institutions adopt Communities of Practice to design productive strategies and cope with the technological and diverse changes.

Best Approaches that Capitalize on Communities of Practice

Several tools and technologies are available to expand the scope of CoPs, such as digital platforms and marketplaces that proffer valuable data of both educational institutions and students. Other than digital portals, here are a few best approaches with proven outcomes.

• Analyze information from messaging (email, SMS).
• Gather knowledge from E-learning systems and Teleconferencing facilities.
• Create data charts from social media accounts.
• Automation.
• Survey and Polls.

Employ these approaches to capitalize on KM and Communities of Practice in universities.

Effect of Knowledge Management and CoPs Implementation in Universities

In academic institutions use of Communities of Practice and KM proposes new prospects for teaching methods and learning processes. CoPs furnish powerful and practical models for change and growth in the education sector. KM with a Community of Practice helps in forming a constructive community. It also provides a sense of acceptance, improves cross-discipline, and promotes creativity and innovation. The role of Community of Practice creates a sense of unity among diverse staff and students. Hence, it helps in creating versatile teaching methods and unified classrooms. 

Foundation of CoPs in Universities

Communities of Practice have a foundation of three main components; knowledge, institutions, and practices. The educational sphere consists of schools, colleges, or universities. The psyche comprises inferential and direct information. And CoPs based upon communities, domain, and practice. Altogether these components are interlinked with technology and people, assisting higher education institutions in developing adaptive approaches in diverse classrooms.

The core goal of every education institution around the globe is to utilize KM in designing scalable strategies for improved teaching, administration, well-planned research, and conceptual learning. Therefore, CoPs and KM with modern technologies provide a meaningful platform for every academic institution that supports organizations to adapt and incorporate these frameworks.

The Bottom Line

Educational institutions thrive on KM and Communities of Practice. Personal experiences provide tacit knowledge that represents the staff's values and beliefs. Processing tacit knowledge will give explicit information that facilitates better Communities of Practice through dialogues and social interactions.

It is pertinent to understand that people and technology are the functional aspects of KM and Communities of Practice in universities or any educational setting. Community of Practice and knowledge have undoubtedly specified roles that depict the institutional collaborations such as the teachers, group facilitators/leaders, administrations, and learners. This foundation ensures the knowledge-centered working of the institutions. It is noteworthy that a proper linking of knowledge and CoPs always furnishes profitable results. Therefore, to ensure maximum leverage from these two key players, KM and CoPs employ advanced technologies like Big Data and Artificial Intelligence to gather and process relevant information and craft strategies accordingly. 

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Introduction

I work for a major online- and campus-based university with about 5,000 full-time employees and 4,000 part-time faculty. When I began my KM journey, knowledge management within my company, where it existed, was disparate and siloed. It was also limited only to knowledge bases and other similar forms of information management on the DIKW pyramid and even then not managed well.

Because of this, it failed to leverage knowledge collaboratively across the company. By acting independently, we were perpetuating the multiple discovery phenomenon within the company, where individual departments and sometimes different teams within the department were all moving to the same goal in their own way, often duplicating work, making similar mistakes in different ways, and not moving forward as a united front.

This had repercussions and risks in that valuable knowledge was lost, through retirees, department transfers, and general attrition. Financial and process efficiency was impacted, through extended new hire training, recurring development training, repeated mistakes, and more.

Starting Out

I had been asked to lead a new team that focused on knowledge, the first full team dedicated to doing so within the University. At the time, I was also under the impression that knowledge management was nothing more than knowledge bases and document controls. After several months of just getting by, I began to search for training on knowledge management best practices and I stumbled upon the KMI CKM course and sent out inquires.

Initial discovery meetings with Eric Weidner and John Hovell were eye-opening, as my team and I never knew there was so much to KM beyond the knowledge base work we were doing. I was excited to learn more and got approval to host KMI for a private CKM course for my entire team in May of 2018. My team and I loved the training and I was impressed with the depth of Knowledge Management and could easily see how it would benefit the University. I didn’t know how to go about implementing these ideas, but I started to give it some thought while working on other projects.

A couple months later, in July of 2018, I had reason to call together the other individuals in the company who owned knowledge bases within the same CRM platform as mine. I wanted to make a change to the platform and needed their buy-in in order to get it approved.

I organized the meeting at a central location as we were coming from all across the city and we had an agreement within 5 minutes of the hour long meeting. The rest of the time, we chatted about our knowledge bases and the responsibilities thereof. I learned two things from that meeting: First, that mine was the only team in the room dedicated to knowledge, the others had it as a small part of their jobs, and secondly, that nobody in the room, other than me, had any understanding of knowledge management as a whole and what it could do beyond self-help articles. The group itself found the session useful and agreed when I proposed we make it a regular meeting. And so what was then known as the Knowledge Manager’s Council was born.

Building Consensus

We started by meeting quarterly in different locations on campus and in the office buildings the University rented around the city. I would coordinate schedules and often pick a topic for discussion, with a few slides and some research. Many of the topics were ones I had been exposed to in my CKM course. There was always room for open table discussion for the last half of the meeting and we addressed several issues about information ownership and styling in those sessions. We also identified others who had similar roles but not working on the same technology platform that we used. We invited them and several became regular members of the group.

Eventually, after over a year meetings, the knowledge base and platform discussions boiled away and the conversation finally started to turn towards what knowledge management as a field was. Other departments who did not have anyone working in KM had heard of us and had sent a person to one meeting or another to listen to the discussions and my presentations of what I had learned. Most would drift in and then out, without any real change to the group, but a few stayed.

In December of 2019, I proposed that we host another KMI CKM training on-site and that anyone who was interested and could find the budget for it could let me know. To my pleasant surprise, the idea was well received, and we had enough people and funding to schedule a second private CKM class.
Getting Educated.

In February 2020, we hosted our second private CKM course from KMI and instead of consisting of solely my team, we had representatives from several different departments within the University. The class was a hit with everyone who took it and this caused the inter- departmental discussion around KM to really take off.

I often sat in on the training in-between meetings and joined the group for lunch every day. I was interested in what people thought and where their ideas were going. I would ask participants for their ideas and opinions, and to my delight, there was a strong consensus that our company needed more KM and had a willingness to make it happen from the bottom up.

By lunch of the final day of training we had a small group of core believers who wanted to make the effort, and had the capacity, to begin real KM change within the University. There was also general agreement that our quarterly Knowledge Manager Council was really a CoP of sorts and we should formalize it and advertise for membership.

A Call To Action

A small group of participants in the Knowledge Manager’s Council and the CKM course decided to join me in the effort of bringing awareness and adoption of KM methodologies to the University at an inter-operable level. We decided to call ourselves the Knowledge Drivers and our first task was to change the Knowledge Manager’s Council into a true Knowledge Management Community of Practice.

While at the time we did not, and still do not have, a formal leadership hierarchy within the group, I took on the task of, and remain the, main coordinator for the Drivers and the CoP. I was able to get the word about our new community out through several projects I was attached to and, in early March 2020, we had our first KM CoP meeting, replacing the former Knowledge Manager’s Council. What was a group of about 10 individuals who had knowledge, primarily knowledge bases, as part of their job was replaced with about 25 people, many of the former Council included, who were interested in the discussion about Knowledge in general.

We started off the meeting with an exercise those of us who took the CKM course learned there: the constellation. We asked about our new members familiarity with KM as a practice and their interests. We explained what it was and how we wanted to bring it to the University and we did the constellation again to see who thought it would work for their team.

The first CoP meeting transformed the group from what was originally a council of 5 departments to a community with representatives of 9 workgroups across 7 departments. It was a small gain, but a success nonetheless.

Growing The Community

Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic really hit the United States around this time and less than a week after our first CoP meeting, my entire company was sent to work from home as best we could. Now I found myself having to coordinate a new community as well as a new task- group, the Knowledge Drivers, in a remote-only setting. The answer that helped me be successful with both was something I had learned in my CKM course and participated in when the second course happened: The Knowledge Café.

By utilizing features of our remote meeting software, specifically the ability to host individual break-out rooms from a central meeting, I was able to devise a format to use for the CoP meetings that worked for everyone and replicated the Knowledge Café effect with only minimal adjustment for digital life. We would start out each meeting with a sharing presentation, as the community had indicated as a whole that this was one of the things they wanted to see more of. This is where someone from the community would volunteer to talk a bit about something KM related, either a project their team was working on, their team itself and its knowledge, or even an interesting topic that had little to do with a University project.

We would then have a section where the Drivers, usually myself, would report on the work we had been doing towards our goals and then we would finish off with a community exercise that changed for each meeting. Sometimes we would seek feedback on a specific topic or item, others we have a general discussion, using breakout rooms, around different topics, allowing for more sharing and faster transfer.

This approach proved to be very successful and now, nearly 20 months after our first meeting, word of mouth and our outreach has caused the CoP to grow to an invite list well over 120 people and a regular attendance of 40+, nearly 50, individuals. I have been asked, and have given, talks to other groups in the University on the Knowledge Café model and how it has helped drive community engagement in a world where nobody can enter the same room as the person they are meeting with. These groups included our HR department, Customer Experience, Communication and Marketing, and a few others.

Developing a Mission

While I was working on how to best coordinate and operate a community of practice in a de-centralized world, I was also trying to maintain interest and momentum in the new Knowledge Driver’s workgroup. I had a group of influential and excited individuals who wanted to bring true KM to the University in a standardized manner. My initial challenge was to get the group to agree to what that meant and how we would implement it.

In my opinion, the easiest place to start was to craft a business case. It would force us to look at these questions and have those discussions in a regulated manner. What quickly became apparent was that, while we could talk about the benefits of KM in general, we didn’t have, for lack of a better phrase, a monster to slay.

The solution I found was not something I learned in the CKM training or from KMI in general, though I would gladly see it added to the curriculum. I came across it in my own research. That was the anthropological theory of Multiple Discovery. While still a theory, with its own critics and supporters, the basics of it are commonly accepted: that many civilizations throughout history developed the same or very similar solutions to the same problems entirely independently. Essentially, every civilization invented the wheel on its own.

I was able to educate the remainder of the Knowledge Drivers on the Multiple Discovery Theory and we agreed that this was a dragon that we could slay with KM. Our University prides itself on innovation and being ahead of educational trends, but we could prove the existence of the MDT within the University itself, a barrier to innovation and then relate it to other motivating measures such as cost avoidance, impact of turnover and retirements, and time to proficiency of new hires.

Synchronizing Efforts

Now that we had a dragon to slay, which would help us with leadership buy-in, we wanted to know what other goals we could have. I suggested a process which we still use, and that is presenting to the KM CoP at those meetings and engaging the community in our work, so that it was a true grassroots movement, pushed forward by a dedicated few but with input from the interested many.

My first effort into this was a simple polling exercise of the CoP using a tool called Menti, which allows real-time anonymous polling by having members navigate to a website, enter a code, and answer the questions. The facilitator, in this case my training lead, could share the results on the screen for everyone to see. I had us start simple and asked the community “What are you looking to get out of this CoP?”. The answers formed a word cloud that proved invaluable to the drivers and what we wanted to do. With answers such as “Learn”, “Process”, “Best Practices”, and “Definitions”, the Drivers had our first few goals.

I worked with the other Drivers and we were able to incorporate these into our business case and put together a roadmap and timeline for our efforts. We divided this timeline into 4+ phases with the first four being defined, that truly reflects the community grassroots movement my efforts have turned into. In July of 2021 we entered the third phased after nearly 18 months of work laying foundations, getting leadership buy-in, and growing the community and its voice. Presenting To Leadership

With the work of the Knowledge Drivers aligned with the needs and wishes of the Knowledge Management Community of Practice, I wanted to address a pressing issue that had come up in several CoP discussions: what did senior leadership at the University think of us doing this?

In the early weeks of 2021, I rallied the other Drivers and we began putting together a presentation that we have come to lovingly call “The Roadshow” that explained the history of the Knowledge Drivers and KM CoP, explained what our goals and desires were, why KM was important and different aspects of our business case, and showed off our timeline.

In May of 2021, we presented to our first group of leaders, the Chief Information Officer and her direct reports. The presentation was given by a group of four of the Drivers, myself included, where we went through the slides and fielded questions from the group. The presentation was a great success with unanimous praise of the grassroots nature and mission. In the following months we presented to other senior leaders such as the Chief Experience Officer and her staff, and the Chief Product Officer and his.

From these presentations we received unanimous buy-in for the movement and its efforts. As the main face of the group and its chief coordinator, I have personally received invitations to three enterprise-level projects that had given no thought to KM as an advisor on how it could be built into the process. This has had the direct result of both the Project Management Office and the President’s Office becoming a key stakeholder and partner to the KM CoP and the Knowledge Drivers and our efforts.

We are still holding The Roadshow, the next group we are scheduling with as of November 2021 is our Executive Vice President of Human Resources and her staff. I have also given a progress report to the KM CoP about these meetings and their reception, which has had a direct impact on attendance and engagement. It seems with the knowledge that senior leadership will not be shutting the effort down, more people are willing to participate.

Looking Back, Facing Forward

While all this work has been going on, we have had other KM successes as a group. In September 2021, I was asked to meet with leaders in our HR and Communications departments who were told about Organizational Network Analyses by a member of the KM CoP after I gave a presentation on it in August of 2021. Knowledge Management has become something of a buzz-word among leadership since we began our Roadshow and I have been asked to consult with other departments, such as Product Strategy, Academics, and the Library, on standing up their own KM initiatives within their department and aligning them with the whole.

One of my team members, who is herself working on her doctorate in KM and who joined my team in early 2020, has begun standing up a University-wide Knowledge Retention program in conjunction with HR. It is early in its pilot phase, but feedback so far has been tremendously positive. She is a graduate of the CKM program herself and I will let the details of the effort be her own MCKM article.

Looking forward, the Knowledge Drivers, in cooperation with the KM community within the University, is already deep into phase 3 of our roadmap, where we have identified and mapped the current state of KM in the university. Our next step is to analyze this map and see what we can start standardizing, looking for both elephant and squirrel sized projects, and really, finally, drive home the work we have all been striving toward, in my case, for over three years. Conclusion

When I took the CKM course in 2018, I was the only person in the University with Knowledge in my title. To the University, Knowledge was limited to knowledge bases and other forms of information and document management. Now, in November 2021, I am one of three individuals with a title for knowledge and Knowledge itself means so much more.

The three of us, all of us Knowledge Drivers, have joined together to make an informal workgroup we call Knowledge Operations with the goal of working as one team across departments. There is promise of more groups joining us in the coming months.

When I first began my KM journey, knowledge management within my company was disparate and siloed. That was four years ago. With consistent effort and a lot of politicking, I have managed to create and lead a grassroots Knowledge Management movement within the company that has taken on a life of its own. It crosses 9 major departments and members of over 30 workgroups. It has caused KM to become a source of excitement and discussion. While we still have a long way to go to be a true Knowledge Age institution, the foundations have been placed and they were placed by a community of people whose interest and drive made it happen. I am proud of this work and submit this account, as well as the accompanying documentation, as my application for the Master Certified Knowledge Manager certification.

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It may sound strange, but pop culture has a lot to offer Knowledge Management, especially science fiction and superhero franchises. Some of these institutions now stretch across several lifetimes as well as every conceivable kind of media. This includes adaptations in film, television, comic books, radio, podcasts, magazines, novels, gaming of every variety, and much more. Overtime, this body of work has led to a wide range of strategies to simply keep track of it all. This makes these franchises particularly content rich with a lot of characters, alien planets, and generations of creative teams who made it happen. Consider that Superman and Batman are almost a century old at this point, representing an incredible amount of information to organize from their many adventures. And other iconic heroes aren’t far behind! So after carefully reviewing the most popular franchises over quarantine, I wanted to share what stood out most and what seems applicable beyond just your next trivia night.

Why?

You might wonder, why bother tracking an epic battle between good and evil on a planet that doesn’t exist? The short answer, of course, is that people enjoy it and it makes money. But that’s not the complete answer. Even the knowledge products that aren’t directly profitable still contribute by encouraging the myriad outlets of fandom and inspiring more creative endeavors – artistic collaborations, cosplay, and reimagining something that’s been around since before your parents were born! But before you can boldly go where you’ve never gone before, you have to know where you’ve already been.

Who?

Because these franchises are corporate owned intellectual property, it’s no surprise that there’s paid staff dedicated to them, producing a variety of knowledge products for internal reference and future consumption. What’s more noteworthy though are the legions of fans that populate unofficial wikis, zines, and comment threads for no other reason than because they like it. This synthesis of paid and voluntary work is necessary and even reinforces itself, where more of one sparks more of the other.

How?

Search through the information available about a franchise and you’ll soon find official databases and bulky encyclopedias that document every hero and villain, alien species and speculative piece of technology in the galaxy. Then, there are the video interviews and making of featurettes, documentaries and in-depth guides that unpack all the components that collectively make up these cultural enterprises. Communities form around them and become forums for discussion and debate. Interestingly, the franchise and these knowledge resources are really one in the same, just an extension of the experience that empowers people with more ways to engage with the story.

So What?

Your latest project might seem like it’s a universe removed from summer blockbusters and hit TV shows. The difference is that your work, those it benefits, and the results you’re achieving are real – like really real in the real world where things matter. More time and energy might get devoted to fiction, but the best practices pioneered for our entertainment can be useful guideposts towards a higher calling, your higher calling.

Let’s review some key takeaways:

• Combine the paid Knowledge Management efforts of a few with the voluntary passion of many.
• Encourage a sense of community for those who are interested in what you’re doing. These are your biggest fans, thoughtful advocates, and potential reinforcements in future endeavors.
• Develop engaging and easily accessible resources about your work and how it was accomplished, because it deserves that conversation! It’s these things that allow other people to learn from your valuable experience.
• And most importantly, use all these touchpoints to spur a creative cycle where past projects inform and inspire future ones in new and imaginative ways.

One benefit of fiction is that it helps people rethink and redefine what’s possible. And hopefully, that same impulse behind today’s blockbusters can get us all to look at our own Knowledge Management work a little differently from time to time. Don’t forget that with great knowledge comes great responsibility. I’m sure it’s a burden that you know very well. But in the herculean tasks ahead, you are the real deal and the hero of this particular saga. Good luck and Excelsior!

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Leadership is never easy. It often requires you to strike the delicate and difficult balance between coaching, mentoring, teaching, and commanding. But while it is impossible to be all things to all people, there are strategies that effective leaders can use to build a cohesive, harmonious, and high-functioning team.

Among the most promising of these approaches to leadership is the conversational leadership style. Conversational leadership has been shown
to facilitate a more open, successful, and supportive working environment.

But conversational leadership isn’t just for managers and executives. Teaching conversational leadership skills to employees at all levels can maximize the benefits of this approach, making for a happier and higher-performing team!

What is Conversational Leadership?

As the name suggests, a conversational leadership approach prioritizes rich and ongoing communication at all levels and across all job functions.

The conversational leader is approachable and receptive. They not only accept feedback, but they embrace and, indeed, require it, even when that feedback may not necessarily be what the leader wants or expects to hear.

There is, moreover, a significant element of relationship management in conversational leadership. An effective conversational leader remains ever curious, ever invested, not just in the work, but in the workers. The conversational leader pursues bottom-up communications, devoting time and effort to engaging with and learning about employees at all levels.

The stronger the relationship between the leader and their team, after all, the more likely workers at even the most junior levels will be to share hard truths or promising insights when they arise.

For example, in a workplace that emphasizes conversational leadership, an employee who notices that there has been an unusual uptick in the number of customer complaints regarding a specific product and issue, then the subordinate, who may be a lower-level customer service representative, for instance, should feel comfortable in alerting her superiors to a potential product issue. This kind of frequent and timely knowledge-sharing can help to ensure that problems can be recognized and resolved before they can escalate into a full-blown crisis.

Teaching Conversational Leadership

As beneficial as this approach to leadership may be when practiced at the management level, it may be even more effective when such an approach is diffused throughout the organization, with employees at all levels engaging with colleagues in the conversational style.

Conversational leadership, after all, is principally concerned with the production and sharing of knowledge. But when that knowledge is traveling in two directions only, between the leader and their employees, you miss out on invaluable opportunities both for developing productive relationships between team members and for driving communication and knowledge-sharing across the organization, both vertically and horizontally.

This diffusion of knowledge and, in particular, the prioritization of bottom-up communication is critical to breaking down potentially destructive “barriers to knowledge sharing.” Such barriers, for instance, can easily emerge when subordinate employees feel that they cannot or should not share their feedback with senior colleagues. When the lines of communication are open, transparent, and safe, as in the conversational style, then knowledge production and sharing will be optimized and that, in the end, will make for a far more effective workforce.

For instance, in a conversational workplace, employees are less likely to fear recrimination or retribution for sharing information that, for instance, falls short of projections or flouts stated expectations. This is also important to avoid group-think insofar as a conversational approach allows for, accommodates, and, indeed, even requires dissent and heterodoxy. This could involve, for example, the presentation of data and information that decision-makers and stakeholders might consider “negative” or of ideas that defy, resist, or interrogate the consensus.

Effects on Individual Performance

In addition to the positive impacts of conversational leadership on internal communication and knowledge-building, the approach also has been shown to galvanize individual performance. For instance, conversational leadership, above all, is about cultivating conscious awareness, awareness of oneself, one’s environment, and, especially, of one’s colleagues. This involves both active listening and alert mindfulness.

And when you and your team members are always listening, always engaged, then it’s very difficult to miss nascent problems or to let important opportunities slip by.

Conversational Leadership and Employee Development

The perks of teaching your employees to use conversational leadership aren’t just institutional, however. Teaching the approach can be an excellent strategy for employee development. This is particularly true for team members who may have difficulties with social interactions or who may even be experiencing social anxiety. As reticent employees learn and develop new social skills, they may also discover aptitudes for leadership that they never knew they possessed.

Similarly, employees who already possess a faculty for the conversational style may be encouraged to build their skillsets even further. For example, if you identify a natural-born conversational leader, you may encourage them to pursue additional training, advanced certification, or even an executive Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree.

That means that, through both teaching and role-modeling, you will be building teams of leaders, mentors, facilitators, and collaborators. And there are few better ways to cultivate a happy, harmonious, and united team than that!

The Takeaway

The conversational leadership style is highly effective in driving productive communication between leaders and their employees. This is particularly true when the bottom-up approach to communication is prioritized, enabling employees at all levels to offer their insights and share their concerns. However, even more important than the conversational approach between leaders and team members is the value of teaching the style to employees at all organizational levels. Through the teaching of the conversational leadership approach, you can not only support and enhance individual employee performance, but you can also facilitate stellar relationships between employees. At the same time, you will cultivate a workplace environment that optimizes the production and sharing of knowledge. And all this, in the end, makes for more effective, more cohesive, and more satisfied teams.

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Knowledge management tools can improve employees' capabilities, contribution, and efficiency provided they have access to the appropriate information at the right time. Your employees may develop and unleash new prospects within your organization when you have valuable internal data. Better performance also can be achieved with the use of knowledge-sharing technologies. 

With a knowledge-sharing solution in place, you'll be able to provide your employees with all essentials they need to achieve their professional goals while also maximizing their contribution to your bottom line.

A robust knowledge management system will simplify locating and reusing essential data and resources throughout your organization. A knowledge management platform helps you: 

- Develop better products and services

- Develop better strategies

- Increase profitability

-Repurpose existing skills and expertise

-Improve operational efficiency and staff productivity

- Identify market trends early and gain a competitive advantage

-Set a benchmark against your competitors 

- Maximize your collective intellectual capital.

Following are 5 ways in which the right km tools empower your customer service teams: 

As mentioned above, knowledge management tools help around several areas in the organization as a whole. Below are listed ways in which knowledge management tools help customer service teams exclusively. 

• Aids the customer service team with reasoning and understanding:

Knowledge sharing technologies provide your staff with access to and visibility into company-wide data, which in many cases gives context to the decisions they make. 

This is crucial at times because management decisions might make certain employees' jobs more complex. It makes sense to assist them in understanding why a decision was taken to minimize problems. 

Employees can understand how the organization runs and use that information to inform their decision-making in the future by looking at the bigger picture. 

This is crucial for comprehending how the business operates and why specific procedures perform the way they do. The customer care team is more effective when they have access to the proper information.

• Helps create and understand opportunities:

Your staff will be able to take control of their personal growth if they have the correct knowledge-sharing tools at their disposal. Your employees will be able to pick and choose what they wish to learn and pursue their own development goals utilizing your internal knowledge if you provide them access to vital information. 

This implies that they improve their understanding of the company's operations. They aren't acquiring material from an unaffiliated third party; therefore, they learn how to grasp the theory and apply it in your company.

Employees can increase their value and contribution to the organization by expanding their skill sets. Learning new abilities can sometimes lead to new opportunities and efficiencies.

Furthermore, your staff becomes more adaptable with a broader skillset, allowing you to relocate resources between business units as needed. Sometimes all it takes is a little more visibility to give employees more authority. A knowledge base can help you take advantage of this potential.

Helps fill the gap between Teams and Business Units:

Knowledge-sharing solutions aid in the dispersal of information across the typical knowledge gaps that most businesses face. Increased sharing can help decrease barriers to collaboration by allowing all employees access to critical information.

This will enable individuals to understand and empathize with the internal issues that others in the business experience. This is crucial for establishing a positive working relationship that maximizes production and efficiency. 

Information can be aggregated into a single centralized area using a knowledge base, allowing employees from around the company to access the same data. 

This helps to bridge the inherent gaps that exist across teams, allowing for even more collaboration chances. Teamwork, communication, and coordination become easier to achieve when everyone is working from the same information.

• Improves the decision-making process:

Every day, your employees make decisions. These are based on their personal experiences and knowledge. While this is usually sufficient, there is likely additional information in the industry that could assist them in making the best selections.

You can help your employees make the best decisions for the company and their coworkers by implementing the correct knowledge-sharing tools in the workplace. 

Employees can further defend their actions and ideas by using information from various knowledge-sharing systems, such as content repositories and knowledge bases. This allows them to go above and beyond their degree of ownership and open up new business prospects.

• Helps the team members understand their role: 

You may encourage your staff and help them appreciate their contributions by giving them a better understanding of what they do, how it affects and benefits the firm and its position in the systems that offer value to your consumers. 

This is especially crucial when things go tough; if your employees understand why and what their hard work contributes, they'll be even more inspired to work hard. 

A knowledge base software can help with this by providing insight into the company's overall operations. Employees will appreciate what is going on around them as documentation is written and preserved, and they will be able to change accordingly. This is significant because it allows them to see processes and infrastructures that would otherwise be hidden

With the proper information sharing technologies in place, you can boost your employees' productivity, empower them to grow and diversify at their own speed, and guarantee they have everything they need to learn what they want when they want it. This is critical for keeping your employees happy, allowing for professional development, and fostering continued growth.

Conclusion 

Knowledge management tools have shown their value throughout time. They provide a new way of doing things and a better experience for both customers and staff. Choosing the right knowledge management platform for your firm streamlines the process, saves time, and increases team efficiency.