Knowledge Management Systems – The Complete Overview

“An organization, no matter how well designed, is only as good as the people who live and work in it.” Wise words by Dee Hock, the founder of Visa Inc. Your workforce and their knowledge are truly what gives you a competitive edge.

Losing them means the loss of critical revenue-generating processes and information. This is why having an effective Knowledge Management System in place is critical. It also inculcates organizational learning – overall promoting a growth-oriented culture.

But it is of no use if your employees are not able to use it – technology adoption is critical for an organization to reap benefits from it. It is critical to simply and centralize the process of knowledge collection, management, and distribution with a user-friendly platform with no need for contributors to have the technical expertise to operate it.

What is a Knowledge Management System?

A knowledge management system helps organizations streamline and automate the process of knowledge creation, collection, retrieval, and sharing.

Basically, you can create an accessible central knowledge base – secure for enterprise-grade use cases – one where accurate organizational information is easily found by any employee looking for it.

A well-designed knowledge management system improves cooperation, saves time and money, and aids workers and executives in making better business choices.

What is Knowledge Management?

Antunes et al. share in the research titled “Linking knowledge management, organizational learning and memory” that organizational knowledge management is defined by 4 types of processes:

• Knowledge capture

• Knowledge storage – in an organized and accessible knowledge base

• Application of knowledge – the acquired knowledge is actually distributed and used for collaboration

• Knowledge protection – many knowledge assets are confidential with business-critical information or Personally Identifiable Information of employees that must be restricted to authenticated users only

But… What Exactly is Knowledge?

Knowledge is more than just a collection of information. It is your information combined with experience gained over the years alongside a personal intuition that we sometimes termed as a gut feeling or human instincts.

Major Types of Knowledge

Yes, you heard that right… knowledge has a variety of knowledge types. There are actually 3 major types of knowledge out there. Let us quickly explore these:

1. Explicit Knowledge

   The tangible form of information that is processed and stored – record, document, and organize it in a knowledge base, making it easily shareable between employees. Have this in video form for better retention and higher engagement.

2. Implicit Knowledge

   Knowledge gained without awareness – difficult to express and share – merge this experience with other learned information to solve an entirely new problem.

3. Tacit Knowledge

   Intangible knowledge is gained through years of experience by knowledge workers honing their craft and transforming into subject matter experts. Interview these subject-matter experts or have them record and upload user-generated content to your internal knowledge base.

Process of Knowledge Management

The right knowledge management process has to be set in place to achieve the desired results. Just like having control over the general monetary resources, for your business-critical knowledge assets, you can't let them slip out of your hands.

Here are some critical steps of this process:

1. Discover

   The first step in developing a knowledge management system is “Knowledge Discovery” – which makes sense as you can’t preserve what you don’t know! You must first understand and extract useful information from your various organizational processes, communication channels and subject matter experts.

2. Capture

   The knowledge your company has developed over the years is a valuable asset and can be used for a variety of applications. It's important that this knowledge is accurately acquired, where knowledge (both explicit and tacit) is documented and captured in a format that is easy to understand and use.

3. Create

   Have a centralized, accessible knowledge base in place, where knowledge workers can be encouraged to record and upload videos of their expert advice or processes to reduce onboarding time, improve efficiencies, and work to correct knowledge gaps across your entire team.

   Teams can then easily collaborate and work together to preserve important information in an organized and easy-to-understand environment. How? Well, VIDIZMO makes this all possible!

   VIDIZMO’s video knowledge management platform allows you to create your own internal employee-focused or external customer-focused knowledge base institutional knowledge management.

    

   
   Here your employees can upload content created by them, or managers can organize any other captured knowledge in the form of various digital file formats (videos, audios, images or documents). The platform support streaming of recorded live and on-demand videos easily manageable through a suite of advanced AI-powered video management capabilities, including:

   • • Scalable, secure video storage

     • Automatic transcoding – supporting 255+ digital file formats

     • Content organizations – with playlists, categories, auto and manual tags

     • Smart search – search inside videos for spoken words, on-screen text, faces & objects

     • Video clipping and merging of lengthy videos, like recorded meetings – creating micro-learning bites

     • Enterprise-grade security – SSO integration, end-to-end encryption, IP restriction, role-based access controls, & much more

     • Broad coverage of all major industrial and regional compliances like GDPR & HIPAA

     • Archival portal to store less frequently accessed digital media

     • SSO-enabled embedding of your videos or entire video portal in your SharePoint, LMS, or any other 3rd party site or application

     • Content moderation – moderators can approve or reject a file uploaded by contributors

   

4. Organize

   Knowledge created and captured in the form of videos and other digital assets must be made accessible to your teams in an organized portal with smart search capabilities for accurate discovery.

5. Distribute with On-demand Access

   The stored knowledge is of no use if it doesn’t reach the right people at the right time. Knowledge sharing is a critical component of the knowledge management process. VIDIZMO’s video library supports on-demand access of your digital files to authenticated users and groups.

   You can also securely share your knowledge assets with external users either publicly through social media or privately via email or temporary guest login within the portal. You can limit the availability time frame and number of views allowed, password protect these links, and expire them once the need ends.

6. Collaborate

   Finally, collaboration is a key component of the knowledge management process – the knowledge base will support internal and external communications, interactions

Learn More: Knowledge Management Checklist

What are the Key Challenges of Knowledge Management?

As impressive and useful as knowledge management sounds, it comes with a ton of challenges that restricts its implementation. Here are some key knowledge management challenges:

1. Outdated technology – creating more problems and limiting productivity rather than making it easier for your teams to access relevant resources when needed.

2. Lack of employee motivation – without employees willing to adopt and make use of the new knowledge management system.

3. Ensuring the security of shared information – internal knowledge base stores business-critical confidential data that needs to be safeguarded using end-to-end security measures; not an easy challenge to overcome without the help of an enterprise-grade knowledge management platform.

What are the Two Major Types of Knowledge Management Systems?

Here are the two major knowledge management tools that complement each other for the creation of a streamlined system, supporting the implementation of all knowledge management best practices:

1. Video Content Management Systems (Video CMS): like VIDIZMO that helps you create a YouTube-like internal and/or external video-based knowledge base

2. Learning Management Systems: like Blackboard, are used to carry out corporate learning initiatives by enterprises to upload learning material like slides, PDFs, and text to deliver training courses and programs. LMS video integration with a Video CMS brings in the missing video training element to your corporate training platform

Read More: Things You Should Know About Knowledge Management RFP

What is Enterprise Knowledge Management?

According to a research paper by D. Jimenez-Jimenez et al.:

“Knowledge management is all about managing the flow of information, which ensures that the right people get the right information at the right time.”

Enterprise Knowledge Management is bringing the 3 Rs together for internal teams and external stakeholders: ensuring you are providing the Right People with the Right Information at the Right Time!

Video for Enterprises – VIDIZMO: The New Age of Knowledge Management

Short attention spans and high growth expectations are a deadly combination that enterprises are working with today. Tradition knowledge management methods are just not the right fit anymore.

Video is the key to ensuring the adoption, engagement, and retention of knowledge management processes.

An enterprise video platform can be your very own video knowledge management platform – well-connected with all other critical business apps, including:

• Video Conferencing Platforms (like Zoom and MS Teams) for online meeting recording management

• Learning Management Systems (like Blackboard) to bring video right to your corporate learning initiatives

VIDIZMO allows you to create your very own enterprise knowledge base – or a Corporate YouTube – that can handle videos along with all your other digital media types.

VIDIZMO provides you with:

Scalable Storage – flexible storage on-premises, in any private cloud of your choice, or as a hybrid solution

Quick Video Editing Tools – clip, merge, create microlearning bites, choose custom thumbnails, redact, and do much more

Organic Discovery through Content Organization Capabilities – playlists, collections, categories, manual tags, automatic tags, multilingual tags, smart search (platform-wide and/or in-video), feature on the home page, etc.

Smart Search - jump right to the right parts of a video through the in-video smart search for spoken words, on-screen text, faces and objects

Collaboration Tools - using times annotations, comments, public or private sharing, in-video quizzes, polls, surveys, and much more

Archive – your unedited videos and other documents in an archival portal separate from your regular library

Embed – have your player or portal tab embedded in your SharePoint, LMS, or any other 3rd party site or application

To learn more about how KM works in different industries, we've compiled two different blogs for you:

• Knowledge Management in Legal Department

• Knowledge Management in Insurance Industry