Working For Change
June 26th, 2006:Being able to share knowledge effectively and actually make it work practically are two ideals that may be further apart than you think. Avand’s Chris Gorry is optimistic that with good practices you can narrow the distance.
The benefits of managing and sharinginformation in a typical business or organisation are many and undisputed, and there are plenty of great tools and applications that make the job quick and easy by modern standards.
People are creatures of habit. In our jobs and our daily lives we find routines and ways of working that make us comfortable, that play to our strengths, make us more productive or get us ahead in some way. Over time these routines become so ingrained in what we do and how we act that we can play them out subconsciously without even realising were doing it. This applies equally to entire organisations.
Unfortunately, for many people – and by extension many companies – knowledge sharing is not a force of habit. Yes, we all have different systems of working with our colleagues and sharing information, and may even use very complex and effective systems to do this.
Over the past decade Ive worked with hundreds of organisations just like the ones Ive described above. They all share a hunger to manage the information stored in letters, documents, emails, office applications and meeting minutes so that everyone can benefit from the content. They share something else, something a little more difficult to overcome but which ultimately determines the success or failure of a knowledge management project: the need to change.
The organisations that ultimately succeed in finding an effective knowledge management solution arent those that necessarily use the best software or design the best processes, although both aspects are critical to success. Its the organisations that simplify the knowledge management process by making it easier to collect, store, share information and make it part of the daily business processes that come up tops every time.
So, how do you go about encouraging what is, essentially, a cultural change in your organisation?
Everyday People
Effective knowledge management is not something thats dictated. It needs to happen seamlessly, becoming a part of everyday activity. For example, consider how much knowledge is shared in company meetings, or posted on Internet forums, portals and blogs. By making it easier to capture and share information from a variety of sources, both formal and informal, organisations encourage change naturally, steering away from artificial incentives towards the natural attraction of simplified, streamlined workflow. When it comes to finding a knowledge management solution for your business, consider that most people already have a set of tools theyre comfortable with and know how to use. Making them use a tool that doesnt integrate with what theyre already using will make it difficult for them and for you.
Software solutions that integrate with other business-critical systems and familiar office productivity applications simplify the process of capturing information from different information sources. Every step saved in capturing information is a step gained in making knowledge management second nature for your staff. Change effectively happens without them realising it, and the process quickly becomes entrenched.
Workflowing
Other factors rapidly gaining mindshare in Australian organisations include webforms and workflows. Webforms can be used to capture informal communications, such as verbal customer requests, while workflows enable this 'knowledge to be easily communicated to relevant people in the organisation.
Coupled with these is the need for flexible, secure searching to easily access the captured information. Making it easy to find captured information is just as important as capturing it in the first place. Staff are now very familiar with the search capabilities offered by the Internet and transferring this to the work environment fosters acceptance of corporate systems.Todays knowledge management solutions are increasingly becoming open-source and web-based to interoperatewith the myriad of information sources, portals andemerging web technologies. The end-goal is to maximise the speed and simplicity of capturing information anytime, anywhere, and being able to share it quickly and easily so it becomes a matter of habit.