More About Knowledge Management

What Drives KM?

The field of knowledge management is driven by an age old need for us to be able to pass on our knowledge and thoughts to firstly, those around us, and then secondly, to those who are located geographically and temporally distant from us.

Great advances in our ability to transfer knowledge coincide directly with the development of the human race such as language, art, the written word, the printing press, and more recently information technology and the world wide web. With these later day technologies the rate at which information is being created is rising exponentially thereby forming new challenges such as how do we find what we want as quickly as possible? Or how do we attribute accountability to information? How is the information best presented and shared?

Additionally the rate of change in our world is much greater than it ever was before and the affect is in fact self-propelling: as the rate of change increases the rate at which we need to transfer knowledge must also increase which in turn compounds the cycle. An related artefact of our state of flux is the fluidity of the labour market which is unlike any other time in our history. People are changing jobs more frequently and, it follows, spending on average less time in any one organisation. This is also self-propelling situation because organisations must not only create new roles and jobs to manage the rate of external change but they must also continue to communicate a sense of culture and direction to an ever-changing workforce. These challenges in turn focus organisations in on their ability to capture the knowledge of current employees and make it available and readily usable to current and future employees.

It should be further stated that the knowledge management challenges are not reserved solely for the organisation-employee relationship but also exist for the organisation-organisation (e.g. two companies collaborating on a project), intra-organisational (e.g. teams or divisions sharing knowledge), and organisation-individual (e.g. retail business to consumer) relationships. In all types of relationships effective communication and knowledge management is critical to their success.

What challenges do you face? Do you need to have an easier to manage staff induction programme? Are you struggling with disparate project team members collaborating? Do you find that it's difficult to find documents you need? Are people invariably using the wrong documents? Is your organisation going through pain in trying to comply with industry or government legislation? If so, please contact (LINK) us.

What is Document Management, Content Management, etc.? How do they relate to KM?

Related to knowledge management are the technologies variously described under:

• Document Management;
• Enterprise Content Management;
• Electronic Record Management;
• Digital Asset Management
• Intranets; and
• Extranets.

Much of these technologies relate to each other and in many cases converge in different product and process solutions. Document management usually relates to the technology that encompasses the management of documents such as Microsoft Office documents or Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) documents. Management includes version control, audit and taxonomy.

Documents can be quite easily considered content and therefore may fall under the banner of content management, however, this term is usually used when referring to content that is published in the form of web pages or web page content. This type of content generally requires a slightly different set of base requirements due to the presentation and control required to run large web sites.

Electronic record management is a similar and overlapping field to document and content management. The primary features of electronic record management are a greater level of control and accountability over content whether that be in the form of documents or web page content. The reason for this deeper level of functionality is generally due to industry or government regulatory compliance required due to the sensitive and importance of the content under management. An example of where electronic record management comes into its own is in the case of having to comply to the U.S. Sarbanes Oxley Act which includes statutes to improve the traceability of accounting documentation (amongst a host of other measures).

The fourth technology mentioned is digital asset management which is a technology that tends more to relate to content that is rich media such as music, images and movies. For example, a digital asset to an organisation might be their standard brand logo. The management of this logo is similar to that of a document but differences do exist such as the presentation of the logo and the formats that are required (one for editing in Photoshop and one for distributing to web sites for example). Furthermore the contents of these files bring new challenges to taxonomy because their content generally does not hold textual information (images of scanned documents are one exception).

Intranets and extranets are mentioned here but differ considerably to the previous topics because an Intranet or an Extranet relates more to a technology platform than a field of practice. That platform is the web platform and the term Intranet comes from the term Intranetwork and coincides with Internetwork/Internet but refers to the internal network of an organisation. Similarly an extranet refers to the same technology but used to 'open up' part of the intranet to an organisation's external stakeholders (clients, suppliers and so forth). Why we talk about Intranets/Extranets here is because the technology is an excellent platform for operating a knowledge management system whether that be a document management system or a content management system. Naturally, the web platform is not the exclusive method for running a knowledge management solution, there are many successful systems running on other technologies such as directly with the host operating system (Linux C++ binaries or Microsoft Windows DLL's for example), however the ubiquity, speed of development and accessibility of web technologies is proving to be popular for knowledge management systems.

If you are looking for a document or content management system, or an Intranet/Extranet solution please contact us.