Organizations arrive at Knowledge Management (KM) for a variety of reasons that are often hard to define or pinpoint.
Frequently, executives or managers sense that something within their organization could be improved and hope that addressing this issue will improve morale, make it faster to get new staff up-to-speed, or generally alleviate tensions stemming from difficult-to-access data, information, and knowledge.
Common Indicator of Knowledge Management Challenges
If you’re hearing these comments from staff, it’s quite likely that you have a knowledge management problem within your organization:
“We don’t know who does what.”
“We can’t find what we’re looking for.”
“We want to work together better.”
“We feel like we keep reinventing the wheel.”
“We need to reduce duplication of efforts across silos.”
“It’s tough to collaborate.”
“We’re doing more work across departments, and it’s not going as smoothly as we’d like.”
“We’re not as transparent as we’d like to be.”
“We want to do a better job taking advantage of our staff’s expertise.”
“We don’t do enough with the knowledge we produce.”
“We are generating tons of data, but we don’t know what to do with it or how to make sense out of it.”
Diagnosing a KM Challenge
If you’re hearing lots of these pain points and frustrations from staff, chances are good that you have challenges at your organization related to how staff are managing their internal knowledge and information.
Congratulations, you’ve diagnosed that you likely have a KM challenge. But now what? Diagnosing a knowledge management challenge is a start, but it doesn’t solve the problem.
This is where the real work comes in. Once you’ve diagnosed the problem, it’s time to get started to shift from ad hoc knowledge management practices to defined, formal, organizational ways of managing knowledge.
