KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IS ESSENTIALLY ABOUT GETTING THE RIGHT KNOWLEDGE TO THE RIGHT PERSON AT THE RIGHT TIME

It really doesn’t matter what industry you operate in – knowledge management is something you have to think seriously about. If you think about it, everything in your business is based on knowledge, that is data and information. Whether it is your product or service, which is built from knowledge held by your people, or your ability to engage with customers and provide value, which is based on knowing about their needs, or even your internal policies, which is based on knowing about best practices in the industry.

If your organization didn’t have knowledge, then none of these things would have been able to happen. That said, it’s not enough to just have the knowledge. The knowledge should be able to flow through the organization and reach the right people. That’s what knowledge management is all about.

What is knowledge management?

At its heart, knowledge management is essentially about getting the right knowledge to the right person at the right time. It is all about how you document, store, communicate and apply knowledge in an organization in order to improve the processes of the organization and, ultimately, its bottom line. Knowledge management is about finding the best ways to do the things above, so that it can be available on demand for anyone that needs it. In order to understand knowledge management better, we need to know about the different types of knowledge, namely explicit and implicit, or tacit, knowledge

Explicit knowledge

This is any knowledge that is codified and stored and ready to be shared with others. Thing about the rule book, memos, databases, tutorial videos at your company and so on. All of these are examples of explicit knowledge.

Implicit knowledge

This is the knowledge inside the heads of people on your team. But that’s not enough. For it to count as implicit knowledge it also has to be especially difficult to explain. Think about their intuition, natural talent and experience gathered over the years. Implicit knowledge is not only hard to explain, it is as natural for the holder as breathing. We all breathe easily, but not only do we rarely consciously do our breathing, many of us don’t even understand how breathing works!

The importance of knowledge management

Knowledge management is all about utilizing the knowledge in an organization to help it thrive. By having proper knowledge management, an organization can store explicit knowledge and organize it, codify implicit knowledge, turning it into explicit knowledge, and make all that knowledge accessible to your team or audience, so they can work better.

Knowledge management systems help with workflow, onboarding activities, and even HR processes, among others. For customers, knowledge management helps the organization to keep its customers informed and engaged, as well as build their trust in the brand. This can be in the form of bog posts, videos, FAQs, wikis, case studies, and social media content, among others.

What are the benefits of knowledge management?

There are many useful benefits to having a knowledge management system. Below are some of the most important ones:

It aligns the whole team

Knowledge management makes communication more systematic, which enhances collaboration. It also makes it easier for employees to see how their knowledge contributes to the betterment of the organization, getting them more engaged in the process.

It makes the team more productive

Organizations agree that improving their knowledge management systems makes them more productive. With a good knowledge management system, your employees have access to instructions to help them carry out their tasks and follow best practices. They can also communicate and collaborate with each other better and are more efficient as a result.

Persists knowledge in the organization

Good knowledge management helps your organization retain knowledge, even after the knowledgeable employee has left the organization.

Improves the customer experience

Good knowledge management is just as good for your customer as it is for you. Customer-facing knowledge allows the customer to better serve themselves, which improves engagement while reducing your workload. It also helps your customer support team by providing them with a large knowledge base that empowers them to deal with customer issues.

Steps to building an effective knowledge management framework

So now that we understand the benefits of knowledge management, how do you build a good knowledge management framework? Below are the steps:

Have a clear focus

The first step is to know who, exactly, you’re creating the knowledge for. Whether its for your internal team or your customers, it’s important to know who, so as to build the right knowledge management framework.

Define everyone involved and what role they will be playing

Everyone on the team should contribute to your knowledge building efforts. You need project managers, who oversee the initiative, knowledge finders, who gather the knowledge, good communicators to package it, and creators to make it accessible to the most people. These and other roles need to be defined well from the start, so as to make the process more efficient.

Define the tools you will use

Modern technology is a boon on the knowledge building process. There are many tools out there that you can take full advantage of when building a knowledge management framework. A searchable knowledge base is a good place to start. Not only should they be easy to search and navigate, but also allow for optimization and analytics, as well as communication and collaboration. You may also need separate communication, project management, and content creation tools.

Collect data

Next, collect internal data, reports from third parties, and consumer generated content for your knowledge management system. The main focus at this point is to collect data. It can be analyzed later.

Organize the data

Once you’re done collecting data, you can now organize it. For example, separate customer reviews into positive and negative, and then rank them. For most of your data, you will have to create some kind of hierarchy to help make sense of it.

Summarize the most important information

Next step is to give the data some context. Summarize findings in the most objective way you can, while giving it proper context. You can then store, analyze, and apply all that knowledge in the future.

Conclusion

As you can see, knowledge management is an extensive subject, and a single article can’t possibly hope to cover the full scope of it. We have tried, however, to cover the most important aspects. The main takeaway is that, with proper knowledge management, your organization can do much better.

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The Healthcare industry is a knowledge driven industry and depends heavily on availability of updated trainings, health services, innovative and clinical knowledge to solve problems and provide best possible healthcare, innovate, and achieve excellence in the field.

A well-defined Knowledge Management (KM) framework is critical in healthcare organizations to achieve this goal. Knowledge Management is all about connecting people to people and knowledge enabling them to achieve strategic objectives such as innovation, competitive edge, continuous learning, and improvement.

Let’s see below why a KM framework is vital for healthcare organizations.

Empower decision making capabilities: In the digital age, everyone is constantly bombarded with new information. Healthcare professionals need to make informed choices all the time to make critical decisions that might be lifesaving, however, they might feel handicapped if the information is not streamlined and accessible on the go and round the clock. A healthcare Knowledge management system can help with the flow and accessibility of information that can enable doctors to research valuable information regarding symptoms and medical issues that can make life for patients better.

Prevent medical errors by protecting knowledge: Like any other field, healthcare is also highly competitive. As employees leave or are laid off, their knowledge of medical procedures of best practices in their specific field of specialization is lost with the employee, which creates a knowledge gap and room for errors which can be disastrous in the healthcare industry. The healthcare KM solutions can standardize all medical procures, best practices and provide easy access to the required trainings. This ensures that all required knowledge stays and is accessible on the go to everyone even if a person leaves thus reducing the risk of mistakes due to lack of necessary knowledge.

Encourage upskilling: Medical is one field that is continuously evolving with new medical procedures, drugs research and trials. To provide optimal healthcare and medical advice, the medical students cannot rely on the knowledge they learnt during medical studies. They need to constantly evolve and upskill themselves.  The healthcare organizations by establishing a KM framework can encourage sharing knowledge, best practices, learnings, industry research and developments that can be accessed by all to upskill and learn from others.

Collaboration with other experts:  The health care system is one of the most complex systems that we encounter in society (Anderson & McDaniel, 2000; Orr & Sankaran, 2007; Re-inhardt, Hussey, & Anderson, 2004); it requires collaboration with people in different healthcare domains to provide best healthcare to every individual. With medical records, going digital, it is much easier for doctors to share, search and discuss records which is a concern for many because of the threat to patient /doctor confidentiality.
However, a KM system enable you to capture, and share symptoms, medical condition or any other helpful information while keeping the identity anonymous. This makes easier to share life-saving knowledge without compromising the patient’s privacy.

There is ample evidence to support how a KM framework can help healthcare organizations and professionals improve quality of care of the patients and save lives. The setting up of a KM framework in healthcare organizations is no longer a choice, it is imperative to make more-informed choices and improve patient care, which is the ultimate goal of healthcare industry.

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Information is crucial to the success of a business. Without proper management of information, there won’t be synergy among the staff, which could hurt its success. We now live in an era where staff cooperation is needed more than ever, especially as there are various means of communication and information gathering. These different means of gaining information or communication don’t translate the data into helpful knowledge. Also, it doesn’t guarantee that the knowledge gained will be shared appropriately. Knowledge management comes in here, so this post is just for you.

This post will arm you with the necessary knowledge you need to have about knowledge management and how to determine the right knowledge management strategy that will suit your business.  

What is Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is the creation, use, sharing, and management of information in any organization or business. This process involves the employees of a company and their customers. It is geared towards using knowledge to improve a company’s competitive advantage and allow it to be dominant in the market. In essence, knowledge management is making appropriate use of a business’s information.

The main areas of knowledge management are;

• Knowledge accumulation
• Knowledge storage
• Knowledge sharing

Benefits of knowledge management

• It makes it easy to access knowledge and information
• An efficient workplace
• Quicker informed decision-making
• Optimized collaboration
• It improves idea creation
• Efficient knowledge and communication network for business
• Boosts information and knowledge quality
• The improved training process for employees
• Boots employee focus and morale
• Security for business information
• Faster, better decision-making

Types of Knowledge Management

The types of knowledge management are;

Explicit Knowledge
Implicit Knowledge
Tacit knowledge

1. Explicit knowledge

Explicit is the knowledge reduced to a physical form through writing. It is the knowledge that has been codified, documented, and shared in that manner. It is the knowledge that is rigid in form. In summary, it is knowledge with a formal structure. Examples are instructions, reports, charts and other diagrams, worksheets, FAQs, office slides.

2. Implicit Knowledge

Implicit knowledge is, in essence, applied knowledge. It involves learned skills and the application of explicit knowledge to a scenario. Implicit knowledge is knowledge gained then applied to solve a problem. It consists of putting explicit knowledge to practice. For instance, using a strategy slide which is a form of explicit knowledge to a situation, would be categorized as implicit knowledge.

3. Tacit Knowledge

Tacit knowledge is a mutually understood knowledge. It is the information that doesn’t need to be disclosed before it is understood. It doesn’t exist in a structured format, nor is it applied to a situation. It is knowledge known without being taught. This type of knowledge is informal, and it has cultural ties—for example, understanding body language.

Examples of Knowledge Management Strategy

Documentation: This strategy revolves around centralizing manually or, better still, digitally the business documents. These documents can be stored using a manual filing cabinet or a digital one. This system has the following advantages.

Document retrieval becomes easy, and it is easier when stored digitally.
It adheres to the ethics of running a business.
It helps improve workflow.
It secures document longevity as there are backup processes.
Sharing document becomes easy.

Disadvantages

The document might not be protected adequately from outsiders. For instance, if an employee exposes the password to access digital files, the company can be adversely affected by the compromise.
Documentation can be time-consuming.
The document must be appropriately organized and structured for ease of retrieval, the.
There must be a continued update of documents, or the knowledge contained becomes obsolete.

Intranets and Collaboration Environments

These are private computer networks put on easily accessible and searchable communication platforms. The advantages of this strategy are;

• They encourage cooperation among employees.
• Knowledge flows freely among employees.
• It improves internal social networking among employees.
• Innovation levels rise due to the level of cooperation among employees.
• Organized communication lines that help connect all teams.

Disadvantages;

• Free flow communication can breed distractions.
• Outsiders can easily access it.

Determining the right knowledge management strategy

In determining to use a knowledge management strategy or whether your knowledge management strategy is the right one, consider the following and use it as a guide to inform your decision.

Product Improvement

Knowledge management is not done for its sake. It has to establish something, and one of those things is whether the knowledge you have gotten from customers and other sources has caused you to notice problems with your products. Detecting these problems is a precursor to their Improvement. If your strategy is not giving you knowledge of customer experience with your products and their performance in the market, you should be changing your knowledge management strategy.

Customer Service: Assisted Service

Are your support personnel getting information from their customer service sessions, and how have they used that information? This is what should echo in your mind with your knowledge management strategy. The info gotten from customers through customer service sessions with them should translate to how you can help them. This knowledge of how to help them must also be shared and reused by your customer support. This suggests that there is room for collaboration in your customer support.

Customer service: Self Service.

Businesses now offer customers the ability to attend to some issues by themselves. Companies achieve this by giving customers the necessary direct knowledge. The information needed here is whether businesses share self-service knowledge on time, if customers find the knowledge enticing to read and if customers find the knowledge useful. To be sure of the impact this self-service has on a customer, businesses should provide ways to get feedback from their client. If your knowledge management does not allow you to know how impactful your self-service is, it needs to be fine-tuned or changed.

Impact on Business.

Your knowledge management must have a positive impact on your business. It would help if you got sale figures that would impress upon you the strategy you would take to improve sales. Your knowledge management has the ultimate goal of improving your business and your chances to compete in an already competitive market. If you can’t achieve this, then your knowledge management strategy isn’t as beneficial to you as it should be, and as such, you have to make changes.

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The KM framework has been constantly evolving in the past decades. The importance of managing and leveraging an organization’s intellectual knowledge capital to gain competitive advantage has been stressed enough. With the ever-changing business goals, KM is now seen more and more as an integrated mechanism to bring together functional silos rather than an independent operations to manage intellectual knowledge.  Even though a KM framework varies from organization to organization based on the business structure, goals and operations, the evolution of communities, personalization approach with stress on collaborative culture, informal meet ups are some of the trends seen across organizations with the end goal to create an environment that is cohesive to knowledge share and capture.

However, for KM to succeed and align with the changing organizational trends and business needs, comes the need to evaluate its performance and measure its success against those defined goals. This will pave the path for reinventing KM strategy and use it successfully for gaining the edge over competitors.

Find below some of the metrics you can incorporate in your own KM framework to measure its health and success:

Community usage and business value: How the KM community is faring and helping its members via community metrics dashboard and users’ survey can give a good glimpse of the health in the Community and KM practice.

-The number of visits to the KM Communities
-The number of Community members
-Number of questions asked on discussion forums and response time
-Best practices and process documents shared
-Feedback received in the regular user feedback survey
-New content added to the community and the #times downloaded

Content Harvested: One of the key components of KM is to gather knowledge, insights, success stories and lessons learnt that can be re-purposed by other employees in their work. Therefore, keeping periodical metrics to track content harvested and re-purposed can provide cleaner insights into how your KM practice is fairing.

Campaigns and participation: There are a number of campaigns you can run (few examples listed below) to support KM initiatives leading to Innovation, which is one of the KM end-goals. So doing a pre and post metric to measure success of a campaign can give you an insight into your KM success.

Innovation ideation campaigns where people come together to ideate on a specific topic and come up with innovate ideas to improve processes and applications. The number of participants, ideas generated as well as implemented can be great metrics to show the business results of KM.
Virtual cafes and learning sessions to create awareness around specific tool, application or topic are great way to connect Subject matter experts, and leadership to their team members. No of participants, questions asked and answered, lessons learnt and implemented is a great metrics to track.
Live stream sessions and panel discussions are again interesting KM channels to disseminate KM and the metrics can be easily tracked via the questions asked, topics discussed, feedback received.

Lessons learnt: From all the above, it is vital to track the lessons captured and used. How people who participated or used above channels to download knowledge, actually used it to make their work easy, or save time and money on reproducing that information is a critical metric that is aligned to the key business objective of re-purposing intellectual knowledge to achieve that business advantage.  

KM strategy needs to be agile and keep evolving with the changing customer and business needs. However, to make it effective and successful, you need to quantify and measure it continuously for it to work and achieve your business objectives and enhance customer satisfaction.

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Writing good assessment questions is crucial for being able to manage your organization’s knowledge base. If your questions are poorly written, you won’t be able to collect accurate information. Hence, here’s how to write good assessment questions.

#1 Align the Questions with the Objectives

The first thing you should do is align the questions with the objectives. Think about the aims you are pursuing with the questionnaire. If these assessment questions are part of something much bigger, you need to keep in mind the bigger picture and adjust your questions according to it.

#2 Use the Right Questions Types

The next thing you need to do is use the right question types. Depending on the information you want to get, you will need to be using the right question types to get this information. For example, if you need a longer answer or have too many options to list, make the question open-ended so that the person can reply to it with the right information on their own. At the same time, some questions work better as multiple-choice rather than open-ended.

#3 Keep Answer Options Around the Same Length

Though it’s important to mind your questions, you should also think about the answers you provide, especially in multiple-choice questions. As Elizabeth Jones from the custom writing reviews site Online Writers Rating says, “Make sure that your answers are all around the same length. This will make them equally possible for the respondents and won’t make your respondents lean to longer (or shorter) answers rather than choosing the right ones instead.”

#4 Avoid Using Your Biases When Making Questions

One issue that many knowledge managers encounter when making assessment questions is that they intentionally or unintentionally start using their biases. This leads to the questions being increasingly inaccurate or inherently biased which makes the answers flawed as well. This is why you must avoid using your biases when making questions at all cost. After all, you don’t want to have questions that won’t do you any good during the assessment.

#5 Don’t Ask Unrealistic Questions or Use Unrealistic Situations

Another issue you may encounter when creating the questions is that you will start asking unrealistic questions or using unrealistic situations either consciously or unconsciously. Always ask yourself whether what you are talking about makes sense and is relevant to the assessment and the objectives. If it isn’t, then you probably shouldn’t be asking the question you want to include.

#6 Be as Clear and as Precise as Possible

An obvious thing you should do when creating your assessment questions is be as clear and as precise as possible. As William Atkins from the writing services reviews site Best Writers Online notes, “You should always use terms that won’t confuse your respondents. Don’t use complex or rarely used phrases and tend to stick to words that don’t have multiple meanings. You absolutely need to be clear with what you mean.”

#7 Keep the Tone Consistent Throughout the Questions

To make your entire questionnaire or survey feel uniform, you need to keep the tone consistent throughout the questions. Instead of being friendly and fun in one part and serious and professional in another, stick to a single approach and make sure that your respondents are immersed into the survey with the help of the tone you are using.

#8 Check Spelling and Grammatical Errors

Once all of your assessment questions are complete, the best thing you can do is check their spelling and grammatical errors (if there are any). This will ensure that your questionnaire is fully ready to be presented to the respondents and shouldn’t be reworked, edited, or rewritten again (i.e. you have the final version ready).

#9 Have Someone Else Check the Questions

That being said, before you can consider your assessment questions their final version, you need to have someone else check the questions too and see if they understand everything or notice any errors. This will ensure that you aren’t missing anything important which can happen when you are reading the text over and over again.

Final Thoughts

All in all, writing good assessment questions may take some time, but you will definitely succeed with the task once you practice a little. Use the tips in this article to perfect your writing skills and start creating better assessment questions.

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