Knowledge management – increasing the value of your business

Since the term is pretty plastical: especially in the times we’re in now, where an employee’s stay in a company can very well last a few months only, it would be more than pesky to not only have to let the human resource go. But along with them goes the information they have ascertained while in your organization in – perhaps even paid position – and during the time your business has spent on training them. Worst case: they’re going to take it to your direct competitor.

Knowledge management can’t prevent people from leaving your organization but it can help you keep track of things worked out, thus conserving the intellectual property. And well organized intellectual property is worth millions to potential investors.

The implementation of knowledge management solutions requires a lot of know-how. The deployment of the system should be – regardless of the size of the organization – preceded by the creation of a requirements and specifications documentation upon which the vendor will be selected and which determines what optimizations have to be made to the setup of the system to ensure the maximization of the return of investment made towards the system.

Knowledge management can be useful even for one-man operations, especially in context to the ever growing demand of information involved in our day-to-day operations.

Make sure to talk to us before you start collecting knowledge that you’ll probably end up never finding again.

Poor search functionality in Enterprise Content Management make the systems obsolete

Enterprise Content Management for internal communication, knowledge management and conservation of corporate intellectual property – yes, also for small and medium sized enterprises!

The nature of ECM or enterprise content management is – as the name reveals – to make data once worked on accessible to future projects in order for the organization to save money. At least if they’re not being misused for communication purposes dedicated to reaching out to the customers. There are better solutions out there for that.

One of the primary advantages should be that the access to information is easier than it would have been on paper.

While this proves to be true from a decentralization aspect and that the data is accessible even in the most remote branch office, a lot of organizations don’t or hardly dedicate time and budget on installing sufficient search servers in the system which make finding the information, once it’s been archived, easier or possible in the first place.

Another problem is presented to organizations through the lack of understanding by their team, who simply don’t acknowledge that value of adding search words when archiving the documents or – if forced to do so by the systems setup – will enter no more than rubbish just to get rid of the error message.

As to many problems I’m confronted with in my work there is no one-size-fits-all-solution out there; especially in context to the factor of human failure I’ve outlined above each situation is unique, as is the organization I work with.

However, some general advice would be that upon deployment of an ECM platform make sure that you’ve checked with the vendor and maybe with someone that knows their stuff around search engines (not necessarily your IT-staff) that the search engines included in the ECM are good enough to meet your needs.

Another important factor would be whether documents (PDF, Word files, etc.) can be search natively by the system and actually show up in search results. The alternative would be to mark the documents with keywords upon uploading them which bears the risk of employees not taking this seriously or important words not being included thus making the whole effort invested obsolete.

I’m thinking of dedicating a whole white paper to the whole corporate intellectual property management section in the future.

Let me know whether there is raised interest on this issue.

Who has developed a wiki?

The problem is not setting up the wiki. Further more, it’s not about designing one. Any web designer with poor knowledge can set up a wiki in about 30 minutes.

The problem consists of designing the policies by which the information is to be entered into the system Read more >>