Why should you curate your organization’s knowledge?
In today’s knowledge-based economy, organizations of all shapes and sizes have amassed an enormous stockpile of knowledge that’s been captured in one form or another (slide decks, reports, meeting notes, lessons learned, exit interviews, and more) and then buried within a repository, never to see the light of day again.
The result: tons of unused, untouched organizational knowledge, hidden deep and out of reach — while staff waste valuable time and resources reinventing processes, duplicating each other’s work, making the same mistakes, and rewriting the same documents. In addition to the wasted time, effort, and money, it leads to frustration among staff, sometimes getting so bad as to affect morale.
How can Knowledge Management and Curation help?
Knowledge Management (KM) in general aims to address these issues. By starting with a KM Assessment, an organization can quickly discover what’s working and what’s not in terms of current practices; how the current organizational culture, technology, and tools either enables or hinders knowledge sharing; where knowledge flow gets bottlenecked; and key areas where the organization is most vulnerable from a KM perspective. Throughout the KM Assessment process, we define the current state of how and where information and knowledge are stored — which provides a natural foundation to develop curation services upon in the future.
After conducting a KM Assessment, most organizations determine a path forward incorporating a number of tactics to improve current practices. Consistently, curation bubbles up to the top of the list in terms of priorities, cost, and anticipated benefits.
Curation helps by highlighting and showcasing knowledge, making knowledge assets more easily findable and discoverable, and learning what we can from analytics to continually enhance curation efforts. We use a mix of human-applied and semi-automated metadata terms, dashboards, landing pages, and a variety of other tools and techniques to help surface, share, and analyze access and usage of materials through our curation processes.
Call FireOak Strategies today to learn more or get started.
