What are the three elements for successful knowledge management?

Many companies aim to enhance their organizational capabilities and improve operational efficiency through knowledge management. However, implementing it in practice doesn’t always align with the ideal vision.

The following three elements are important for knowledge management to be successful.

Strategy

When implementing knowledge management, it is crucial to have a clear understanding of the business requirements. You should target the specific business requirements that can be addressed through knowledge management. Keeping these in mind, when developing a knowledge management strategy, make sure to address the following aspects:

• Goal: How knowledge management will address the business challenges at hand.
• Targets and indicators: Define specific targets and establish indicators to measure progress towards those targets.
• Budget: Allocate appropriate resources and budget for implementing knowledge management initiatives.
• Expected effect (ROI): Determine the expected impact and return on investment (ROI) resulting from knowledge management efforts.

People

When promoting knowledge management, it is important to get right people involved. In particular, senior leaders and cross-functional stakeholders are key.

• Senior Leader: An executive or department head who supports knowledge management with a strong will after considering organizational strategy.
• Cross-functional stakeholders: People who can move knowledge management implementation forward.

Leaders can also be people who can benefit from implementing knowledge management, such as department heads with urgent knowledge needs (e.g., an expert in their department is retiring, new employee training cannot keep up). Stakeholders in a cross-departmental position include employees in the human resources department, IT department, etc. Working with them has been shown to improve the effectiveness of knowledge management.

Furthermore, for knowledge management to continue to be effective, knowledge sharing must be ingrained into the corporate culture. To this end, active maintenance and promotion activities are required, such as organizing a knowledge management team that includes people from different positions and departments.

Process

Organizations with successful knowledge management have the following processes running smoothly:

1. Create: Creation of new knowledge.
2. Identify: Clarify the knowledge that exists within the organization and identify the knowledge that is important to the company.
3. Collect: Collect identified knowledge in a way that employees can easily access and use.
4. Organize: Organize the collected knowledge to make it easier to use (classifying knowledge by topic, etc.).
5. Share: Share knowledge across departments within the organization.
6. Use: Employees access and utilize knowledge (used in various fields such as product development and customer service), which leads to performance improvement.
7. Evaluate / maintenance: Continuously evaluate the effectiveness of knowledge management and update the knowledge management system as necessary.

When implementing knowledge management, it is important to seamlessly incorporate these steps into existing business processes.

In order to smoothly implement the processes described above, supporting IT infrastructure is essential. Knowledge management tools such as Kiku helps organizations easily create, efficiently collect, organize, share, and effectively utilize knowledge within their organizations.