It's part of everything you do. It can be granular, like the step-by-step process engineers follow for a product launch. Or it can be strategic, like your marketing team's design language. Show
But what happens when that knowledge isn't documented? Countless questions arise. When it's inaccessible? Execution suffers. Time wasted, unfollowed processes, incorrect information sharing — these problems stem from not having a system with which to manage the constantly growing (and evolving) knowledge base at your company. Building a knowledge management system — or KMS — is about more than just making employee benefits information clear and easily-found. It's like building a shared brain for your org, one that collects learnings and helps everyone operate more efficiently. Here, we'll explain why a knowledge management system is important and how you can build one, so you can spend more time focusing on the task at hand instead of rooting around outdated files. What is knowledge management? Why do you need it?There are two kinds of knowledge management: internal and external. External knowledge is for people outside your company. Think about your help center or FAQs housed on your company website. You do this to help customers — providing a better customer experience by giving them the ability to access information whenever they need it. We'll be focusing on internal knowledge — which are all your company resources for employees. How you create, distribute, use, and maintain all that information The list of organizational knowledge is likely long. It can be the company mission, a team directory, or a process detailing how product managers should interview users. Your KMS makes this info easy to find for your team and remains updated with the latest information so nothing's our of date. Without a KMS, you...
A well-tuned knowledge management system should fire like an engine, driving your team forward by getting everyone the most up-to-date information they need in as little time as possible. All your team’s information is easily accessible in your knowledge management system. Your KMS can...
Building a KMS is one of the highest-leverage projects you can tackle. Once built, it'll serve as the map for everything your team does. Try Notion todayOur personal plan is free forever.Sign upFor web, mobile, Mac & Windows What to consider when implementing a KMSEverything about your company and its knowledge is unique. So before actually shopping for your knowledge management solution, it's important to think about the knowledge you're organizing and the technology you'll use to do it. Explicit vs. tacit knowledgeYou're probably familiar explicit knowledge — it's anything codified into a document and stored for later use. A company policy, a co-worker's cell phone number in a company directory, things like that. The second is tacit knowledge. It's knowledge gained with experience. Often, it's hard to define and turn into explicit knowledge. Knowledge management systems are usually good at organizing explicit knowledge, storing it, updating it and making it easy to find. Tacit knowledge is another story — not because it's less important but rather, because it's rooted in experience. But these two types of knowledge need to work together in your KMS to level up your company and pull learnings from all angles. Japanese organizational theorist Ikujiro Nonaka says, "The key for this synergetic expansion of knowledge is joint creation of knowledge by individuals and organizations." Your knowledge management strategy should bring together the knowledge from your organization (explicit knowledge) and your team (tacit knowledge). The goal should be to cement a culture of documentation at your company, where employees are making strides to turn tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. Knowledge management softwareIn order to choose the knowledge management tool, consider the pieces of knowledge you want to organize. Is it a collection of notes and documents? Is it resources and benefits for your employees? What about steps in a process a specific team should follow? There needs to be a system for collecting, maintaining and serving that knowledge to the right person at the right time. "The key to better productivity is applying technology more precisely," says Gartner analyst Thomas H. Davenport in Rethinking knowledge work: A strategic approach. After deciding what knowledge to organize, here are a few considerations for implementing technology to do it:
Each team can have their own space within your knowledge management system. Remember technology is only part of the equation when creating a KMS. Writer Antonie Botha reminds us that human interaction is part of a rich knowledge management system. The people at your company are responsible for creating and organizing knowledge, while technology gives you the ability to share, collaborate and access it. For example, using Notion for your KMS gives the humans at your company the ability to create and customize your system. Instead of being static and rigid, its collaborative features enrich the relationship between explicit and tacit knowledge. Examples of different knowledge management systemsYour team's knowledge isn't one dimensional — it'll likely range from company resources to meeting notes and everything in between. With Notion, you can create one single KMS for all types of knowledge. Below is some inspiration, along with templates to get you started. A home for all company material Organize all your company's most vital information for employees. Here, each collection of knowledge has its own individual page — like "Office Manual" and "Employee Directory" — making it easy to find and access for your employees. Get the company home template. Your company’s knowledge management system becomes a tool for all your teams. All meeting notes shared across teams for company-wide learnings Think of this like a document management system. When meeting notes are shared in your KMS, so are the learnings for your team. These are tagged by the type of meeting, date, and its participants, making the notes easily-accessible by all team members, so no one misses a beat (even those who weren't in the meeting). Get the meeting notes template. Your team’s meeting notes can be part of your knowledge management system too. A content calendar to manage all your marketing team's work You can even use a KMS to organize different types of media — whether it's a gif for a Tweet, a case study interview, or video inspiration. This system allows you to see where projects stand, who's responsible, and when they're set to launch. Get the content calendar template. Different kinds of media come together in your KMS, like a content calendar. Teams within your company can create their own KMS setups Each team at your company likely needs a specific set of tools, processes and guides to do their work. Inside of your knowledge management system, they can create their own space to access, share and update information. Learn how to make an engineering wiki. Each team can build a wiki that holds their most important information. A public job board Using Notion's sharing settings, you can make any of the pages in your company's KMS public. This can be used as an external knowledge management system, as opposed to the internal systems we've discussed. This way, people outside your company can get the necessary information they need — like job postings or FAQs. This saves your customer support team from getting inundated with requests about what roles you're hiring for. Get the job board template. You can create an external KMS for your job board. How to Build Your Knowledge Management SystemReady to take the action and build your own internal knowledge management system? Using Notion, we'll show you how to make a KMS at the company level. You can apply these same principles to other systems too, like team wikis. And if you need a little help building the perfect setup for your team, we have certified Notion Consultants who can help get you up and running. Plus — this system totally customizable. You can make Notion fit to your workflow. And all that info is centralized in one place, which makes organization and knowledge sharing super simple. 1. Gather the information that'll live in your KMSWhen thinking about building a company-level knowledge base, you'll first need to gather the resources employees need. A repository of this information is a well your employees can continually go back to — so when policies change, or when new hires inevitably forget a few things in the onboarding process, it's all available whenever they need it. These might include:
It's beneficial to gather these documents by topic, making them easier to package when it comes time to build your KMS. You can take this same approach when creating individual KMS systems for your teams. Assign a point person from each team to collect all that team's need-to-know information into one page, organizing it for easy use. It can include:
Updating these pages on (at least!) a quarterly basis helps keep everything fresh. 2. Build & customize itIn Notion, you'll add a page to the This will be a one-stop-shop for anything you team needs. Ease of use is key, so employees can quickly parse through information instead of searching through a floor-length scroll of loose links.
In Notion, your KMS can hold different types of media. Do this for each one of your information collections. So at a glance, employees can quickly see which page they'll need to find the information they're looking for. In Notion, you can even customize how this looks.
Bring your KMS to life with custom emojis or cover images. From an onboarding perspective, you can also create a custom set of materials for each new teammate. It'll have everything in your company wiki, along with relevant information about the team they're joining, their manager, and more. Bottom line — you want this information to be useable by your team. Think about how they consume and share information, and customize your KMS to those needs. 3. Bring your team into the foldThe point of a KMS is getting your team to use it — both for finding information, but also for maintaining its accuracy. None of this is worthwhile unless it's a tool used by your team. Here are a few steps to foster collaborative, effective knowledge management.
Tagging teammates in KMS pages ensures no one misses information. Once employees start adding to the KMS, this fosters a collective brain. To further entrench this practice, create a page outlining how your company should be using Notion — setting guidelines to make these pages productive. But if there's a page someone isn't supposed to see, in Notion, you can set permissions for certain people or teams. For your primary wiki pages, you might want only a few people with editing access. But everyone should be able to read them. Learn more about permissions below. 4. Regular updatesDon't let you knowledge get stale. Set a cadence where you'll routinely check on your KMS to ensure everything's up to date.
Keeping your KMS fresh is another key to it being used by your team. It's like a chef's knife. The sharper it is, the better it is to use (and safer, too). In Notion, maintaining and updating your knowledge management system for the entire company is easy because it's centralized. You can give yourself reminders about specific pages that might need frequent updating, like a team directory or work from home policy. On the page, simply type Keep pages fresh by assigning them to teammates. 5. Optimize for better useAs your company evolves, so too should your KMS. Take stock of how your team is using the knowledge management system. Do you notice a lot of its links being shared in Slack? Are less questions being asked because they're answered by the KMS? This isn't a science, but you can take a pulse check on the system's effectiveness. Notion helps do this by showing how recently someone has viewed a page. Simply hover over the icons on top right to see the last time each page has been visited. This helps you audit your KMS, surfacing which pages might be irrelevant to keep. Then, after you gather some learnings, optimize it. At Notion, one thing we've done is create "Archive" pages inside certain area of our KMS. Here, we'll bury old meeting notes, decision-making frameworks, or outdated info. We find this better than deleting the page, because having it around might be valuable if you need to resurrect something later. If you're wondering how the vacation policy has changed since you started at the company, you can find out what it was before and why that decision was made. Customize your KMS with drag-and-drop in Notion. We also have team-specific wikis in our KMS. So, each team has their own knowledge base, from marketing to engineering to customer support. This way, all their information is neatly organized, making it easy to find and use. Taking the overhead out of organizationA solid knowledge management system becomes an extension of your team. Without a system, knowledge isn't tangible. It lives in employees' heads, slowing down new or existing teammates, plateauing learnings and potentially running incorrect processes — because nothing is written down and accessible. With frequent use, it gets even more powerful. Information is gathered, stored, organized, shared and maintained. That foundation sets your team up to save time, work more efficiently, and collaborate seamlessly. Try Notion for teams today! What are the 5 components of knowledge management?The assessment should cover the five core knowledge management components: people, processes, technology, structure and culture.
What are the 4 elements of knowledge management?The best four components of knowledge management are people, process, content/IT, and strategy. Regardless of the industry, size, or knowledge needs of your organization, you always need people to lead, sponsor, and support knowledge sharing. You need defined processes to manage and measure knowledge flows.
What are the 3 major knowledge management systems?There are three major types of knowledge management systems: enterprise wide knowledge management systems, knowledge work systems, and intelligent techniques.
How is knowledge management created?Knowledge management has been around in some form for decades. As a term, it was coined in the 1980s by Peter Drucker. In the 1990s, KM was recognized as a discipline. Some may argue that KM has been around for centuries in terms of capturing, storing, and distributing knowledge.
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