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Five Ways to Improve Knowledge Management

Our newsletter of February 2002 (now published in Success with Simplicity) introduced the concept of Knowledge Management using, we hope, a fairly simple explanation of what it is and its basic challenge. Below we list five ideas which might help you give your own business a 'KM booster', followed by links to a number of sites for further information

Five ways to improve Knowledge Management
Basic Knowledge Management is much more about people than it is about technology. There are simple, low- or no-cost ways it can be enhanced. Two things need to be achieved:

• frequent interaction between management and staff; between people from different departments (e.g. sales, production and accounts); between internal people and external people.
• 'formal' escape from the day-to-day. So often meetings become focused problem-of-the-moment sessions (or, worse still, blame apportioning sessions) and leave little room for creative thought or knowledge sharing.

Try one of these ideas, or a variation, which you think might suit your particular organisation:

• Start your week with a fifteen minute 'ideas' session, where people share things they have read or seen over the weekend (no, not the football scores!).
• Set aside five minutes at the end of each meeting as 'think time', where each attendee simply recalls one new thing they learnt about the business, or tosses up one idea unrelated to the matter of the meeting.
• Document a key process and hold a review meeting with people not directly involved in the process. The aim here is to get the 'why do you do that?' question to come up. (In our work improving business processes, we insist on cross-functional representation on project teams).
• Regularly include people from 'unrelated' departments in regular department meetings, e.g. get the sales guy to sit in on a production meeting once a week.
• Have a representative from each department give a five minute 'whats-new' presentation to the company once a week.

Any of these things will need sufficient structure that ideas can be captured, but they should be kept as conversational as possible.

For further information
There is an enormous amount of information available on the internet discussing Knowledge Management. The following will give you a good starting point:

Standards Australia KM portal
'Guru' Karl Sveiby's site
The 'Brint' Knowledge Management portal

KM is Hot - The Australian Financial Review 'Boss' magazine focused on Knowledge Management in its February 2002 issue.  This is the lead article.  Look for further articles and case studies in the right hand column of the article's page.

Knowledge Management: From Lifelong Employment to Lifelong Learning - good article by writer Gerry McGovern