Use your intranet for establishing a Knowledge Management solution
Implementing a successful Knowledge Management solution based on your corporate intranet, is that really possible? Yes, we definitely believe it is.
Today, we see many organizations striving to win a competitive advantage by managing knowledge within the organization in a more structured way. Since Omnia and Office 365 will fulfill most of the business needs within this area, we believe that the corporate intranet can be a great vehicle for establishing a successful Knowledge Management solution.
In this blog post, you will learn more about what your intranet needs to fulfill to be able to make the most out of the knowledge residing within your organization.
Support the process of creating and sharing knowledge
Of course, the scope of a Knowledge Management solution will vary between organizations. But when comparing solutions within this area we can easily identify some common denominators.
First, the solution must support the process of creating, categorizing and publishing knowledge assets in various formats, articles, documents, movies and images, etc. Then, users should be able to find and interact with the knowledge assets, for instance, rating, commenting, liking and sharing content with their peers. There must also be a process for providing feedback on content, and by doing so contributing to refining and improving knowledge assets.
Within the Knowledge Management solution users should be able to post questions or to participate in discussions. This could be supported by a Q&A feature or by social tools allowing users to post ideas or hold conversations with their peers.
Connect users and provide great user experience
Furthermore, users should not only be able to find knowledge assets but also to find colleagues that have relevant competencies, abilities, and experience. To support that, the intranet must provide rich user profiles that make it possible to find colleagues based on skills, roles or responsibility.
Users should also be able to contact colleagues in an easy way and to connect to peers and thereby expanding their social network over time. In parallel, users should also be able to create and join topic-based communities where they can meet with colleagues that are interested in the same subjects or areas.
To drive adoption and encourage users to participate, the solution must also be able to support the acknowledgement of those who contribute to the Knowledge Management cause. A common solution for this is to let users that share knowledge, answer questions and participate in discussions to earn community badges that can be added to their user profile.
The solution must also provide an intuitive and personalized user experience on all devices. This includes a customized search experience where it is easy to find people and knowledge assets and personalized navigation to communities of interest. Also, the solution should be able to provide notifications on new and updated content within areas of interest. It should also be possible for users to share the knowledge assets they find interesting with their peers, using email or posting to social channels.
Manage and monitor the solution over time
Over time, a knowledge management solution will host a growing amount of web pages, documents, movies, communities, and other content. To succeed with such a solution, you will also need strong tools enabling administrators to set up, manage and monitor all vital aspects of the solution.
This could mean defining page layouts, document templates or approval workflows, setting up structures of competences or life cycles for content and communities or acting on content that is under-used, poorly rated or past review date.
Take our word for it, if your organization knew what your organization knows – you would surely be more efficient. So, if your intranet supports the concepts and features mentioned above, you already have a great platform for realizing a Knowledge Management solution that has what it takes to improve organizational performance.
So, perhaps it is time to start planning for a knowledge management initiative that will not only give organizational benefits but also make better use of your intranet?