Knowledge Management Process: Guide to a Better Workflow

“Knowledge is power!”

One of the most famous sayings by Francis Bacon. It’s the most overused one, as well. To be fair, it’s true; maybe that’s why.

According to a survey by Gartner, 89% of businesses are expected to compete on customer experience. Knowledge of these matters will lead to a better understanding of how to enhance the customer's experience.

However, it is to wonder.

How exactly do large corporations with various departments, customers, and employees, manage the overwhelming amount of information associated with all these groups?

The credit goes to what we call the Knowledge Management Process, and that's exactly our topic for today!

In this blog, you will learn about the objectives of knowledge management, its process (all the steps involved), and how to improve the process. We'll also be sharing some examples of knowledge management tools.

Objectives of a Knowledge Management Process

This process's key role or objective is to allow for secure storage and a smooth flow of information between all involved parties within an organization. This is particularly important for big corporations, like insurance companies, that deal with an overwhelming amount of data.

Read More: Knowledge Management in Insurance Companies

It sounds more straightforward than it is. A knowledge management process requires developing a system with capabilities that help achieve its objective. According to some academic studies, it is portrayed as a process of knowledge acquisition, creation, storage and sharing. However, it can be extended much further than that.

So, what exactly is this process, and what are the steps involved with the process? Let's get right into it.

Developing a Knowledge Management Process

As with all plans and processes, the steps for developing a knowledge management system are as follows:

1. Selection of knowledge  

   This involves prioritizing what knowledge is vital for an organization. This is the stepping stone, which means finalizing all the critical data for an organization and its requirements. It ensures that the data collected is relevant and accurate to the queries involved.

2. Audit

   The second step involves auditing, which is finding the gaps between the data that is already collected and the required information. It helps you identify existing content that caters to existing queries and what new content needs to be created to address unresolved queries.
   
   There are three types of sources for data:

   Explicit Knowledge: This is documented data that is easy to acquire and share, such as documents, files, etc.
   
   Implicit Knowledge: This knowledge directs how to use explicit knowledge. It is relatively more challenging to acquire.
   
   Tacit Knowledge: This is knowledge associated with experience. It is particularly difficult to acquire as it comes from relative experience collected over time.

   In a company, you can find all these sources of knowledge, but the main difference is that tacit knowledge is not written down, even though it's present. Therefore, it is considered imperative to preserve institutional knowledge for newcomers.

3. Acquisition

   The acquisition phase follows right after the audit. This involves assuring that accurate data is collected from various data sources. It leads to content creation, which was identified in the audit phase to meet the requirements

4. Content Organization

   This part of the process deals with storing and indexing data to make the knowledge retrieval process more effortless.
   
   Traditional digital asset management solutions are outdated, making the knowledge retrieval process even more difficult. Technology has assisted in simplifying this process, especially with the advent of video knowledge management platforms.

   
   Platforms like EnterpriseTube by VIDIZMO offer numerous capabilities to ensure efficient enterprise knowledge management.

   Apart from providing a visual aided experience for better understanding, it also provides the benefit of:

   • Live streaming and recorded video streams ready for playback on demand, on the platforms' portal – using any device, browser, and embedded on any site.

   • Centralized storage for all relevant and differentiated data – organized them in playlists, folders, or multiple independently secured and managed portals.

   • Higher interactivity – features such as in-built quizzes and surveys within videos.

   • Secure storage – with security features like end-to-end encryption, role-based access control, IP-based restrictions, and much more.

   • Automatic transcoding – supports storage and access of digital files in up to 250+ file formats.

   • Artificial intelligence – for indexing and automatic transcriptions in multiple languages, enabling access to a broader audience.

   • Various editing features – including cropping videos into separate ones, setting your playback speed, quality control, and others.

   

5. Analyzing Data

   After organizing your data, it is imperative to ensure that all collected data is accurate and answers the queries in question. A knowledge management process built on inaccurate data will prove to cause more harm than good, and this is exactly why it's necessary to analyze and assess the accuracy of the data that has been stored.

6. Sharing

   Collecting data will be of no use if it can't be shared with others. This process involves distributing that knowledge to the intended user (authenticated ones only, if necessary) so that they can use it to provide benefit to the organization.
   
   A video platform allows for showing relevant videos to authorized users who can view them on playback, directly on their portal, at their convenience.

   VIDIZMO even supports highly secure and safeguarded temporary video sharing, allowing you to:

   • Share videos (and even other digital files) using different expirable links with multiple people

   • Set password-protection

   • Limit their time of availability

   • Restrict the number of views allowed

    

    

   The platform ensures you can easily share videos with specific internal or external viewers without fearing them getting into the wrong hands and revealing your confidential information.

7. Creation

   The last part of the Knowledge Management Process involves adding to the already existing knowledge bank by recording all that knowledge workers have learned through their experiences in the organization. Employees, and other stakeholders with permission, can upload new videos to relevant playlists and portals for their departments to see, adding current information for a more well-informed workforce.

How to Improve the Knowledge Management Process?

• Clearly define objectives and measure them. As with any other project, it is necessary to set goals to achieve and measure your progress towards meeting those goals. You can do this by including checklist items for knowledge management and measuring their effectiveness.

Click here to learn how to create a Knowledge Management Checklist

• Encouraging more interaction among various parties in an organization leads to a better flow of information. This leads to the constant sharing of informal and implicit knowledge, leading to workers becoming more prepared.
  This is precisely where platforms like VIDIZMO come in handy, allowing for sharing of relevant visual content and interaction among all relevant parties, allowing them to like, share and comment on the videos.
  

• Technology-based solutions – using AI to easily access relevant videos stored on the portal and search inside videos for specific content. This makes the process of content retrieval easier and less time-consuming.

This is exactly what VIDIZMO's Knowledge sharing video Solution is all about.

These factors are crucial for organizations, especially considering the rapidly growing knowledge management market. Based on research, the global Knowledge Management market is predicted to grow to $1,232,000 million (about $3,800 per person in the US) by 2025.

It just goes to show how important this concept is!

Read More: Best Practices in Knowledge Management

Examples of Platforms using Knowledge Management Processes

Various knowledge management platforms incorporate knowledge management processes for a more data-friendly environment. These platforms can be summarized as:

• Learning Management Systems, like Blackboard, offers organizations a platform for training their employees by allowing for the sharing of document-based learning content and relevant training information.

• Document management systems specifically aid companies' employees in document retrieval, speeding up workflows.

• Content Management Systems (CMS), like HubSpot,are software applications that manage digital content. They are commonly used to store, modify, and publish web content but can also support other digital content forms, such as audio and video.

• Video Hosting Platforms, like VIDIZMO,offer a secure, centralized database for streaming and uploading recorded videos on-demand basis. Platforms like EnterpriseTube can be incorporated with other tools such as CMS, Video Conferencing apps and LMS (Learning Machine Systems) to promote a more collaborative knowledge-sharing environment.

Conclusion

Data is the backbone of any business as it gives insights into what an organization should focus on. Using efficient steps to develop your knowledge management process is vital for any large organization to ensure the free flow of information between departments and to cover any discrepancies as per the requirements to resolve existing and upcoming queries.

Thanks to technology, we have various tools that aid with developing an efficient process for different purposes, such as Learning Management Systems for training, Content Management Systems for storing relevant content data, or AI-powered Video platforms offering an all-in-one enterprise knowledge management solution to your knowledge management queries, video training needs, and centralized and searchable repository.