Establish the Optimal Team for Building Your Knowledge Management System
When it comes to Knowledge Management, the old adage rings true; “it takes a village.” Building a knowledge management system requires collaboration between various departments and experts. It can’t be done in a vacuum, and it will require constant attention to maintain its accuracy and efficiency over time.
Every role within your organization has its tasks and moments of learning that no other position will experience. So, it stands to reason that you need to tap into the knowledge of as many employees as possible to gather the information that needs documenting for your KMS. Between data collection, documentation, streamlining, programming, and maintaining, you must identify your KMS champions early on. Let’s dig into the roles you need to set yourself up for KMS success.
Knowledge Manager
This is the ringleader of your KMS operations. Your Knowledge Manager (KM) will set the standard for how information is authored and published in your KMS. They will drive the development of how you organize and govern your information and will be responsible for handling adding and removing users, setting access permissions, system restructuring, and more. Your KM will have these main focuses:
Managing information taxonomy
Setting up information libraries, establishing an organizational structure and determining processes for information tags, categories, hierarchies, etc.
Information web context mapping
Mapping and linking articles so that critical and relative information is linked to encourage faster navigation.
Governance and content auditing
To ensure accuracy and continuity of accurate knowledge, your KM should lead the way in developing, training, and overseeing your governance team.
Usage optimization
This includes running reports, speaking with end-users to determine system efficiency, and overseeing the next steps for improvements, if needed. The KM will be responsible for ensuring content meets the standards of consistency, digestibility, comprehensibility, etc. These standards should also include a clearly defined framework for appropriate product and service verbiage, proper authoring of new content, etc.
KMS Administrator
Your KMS Administrator (KA) should work closely with your KM to understand the current state and opportunities, and to implement new innovations for optimal KMS performance. Your Administrator should be your guru for all things that service and grow the capabilities of your KMS over time. Their main focuses will be:
Access and permissions management
Your KA should handle items like creating new accounts for new users and granting permissions to the appropriate knowledge libraries to ensure end-users are accessing the knowledge that applies to their role.
Integrations management
Establishing, implementing, and maintaining integrations using APIs/SDKs to enable information flow between connected systems or applications for easy and comprehensive solutions.
Data analysis
Your KA should configure the proper KMS reporting to enable comprehensive data analysis by stakeholder view requirements. Configuration often begins with configuring the native reporting capabilities of the KMS itself but can extend to projects such as connecting to BI tools.
Product configuration
They should also manage connected products that require a specific knowledge set, such as self-service features. With each connected product requiring a unique configuration upon connection, this can quickly become a sizable task.
Content SMEs
Content SMEs (SMEs) are the brains of the knowledge operation. They are the individuals that have a thorough understanding of your operations and can take ownership of determining what new knowledge is needed and how it must be presented to the end-user. Think of SMEs as your breaking news reporters. When information needs to come to light, your SMEs should be on the scene, gathering pertinent information, fact-checking the data, and repackaging it for mass consumption.
User Performance Supervisors
User Performance Supervisors (UPS) are the individuals that have eyes on all operations that utilize your KMS to perform their work duties. They should be collecting data and reporting metrics on the efficacy of your system in its current state and advising on improvements, such as knowledge format for optimal delivery amongst different end-user types and which specific content is needed to boost performance. Ultimately, UPSs gather intel from click-level operators to guide ongoing efficiency initiatives and ensure your processes enable the best return on your KMS investment.
KMS Trainers
Having an exceptional KMS means nothing if your employees don’t know how to use it properly. KMS Trainers should be your top experts in operating your KMS. They should be involved in onboarding to thoroughly train new hires in navigating the system, and lead initiatives to train current employees on new features, reformatting, or overall improvements to the system. They will work closely with your UPSs and SMEs to support agents struggling with performance by identifying what skills are lacking, where more coaching is needed, or if the existing knowledge requires auditing to resolve the issue.
Content Creators
Your Content Creators (CCs) are the individuals that physically create new knowledge articles and complete edits to existing information. They should have excellent grammar and communication skills, speak the audience’s language, and be able to organize and format the information in a way that translates to the end-users.
End-Users
While all other roles on your Knowledge Management team are focused on providing the optimal information and system to your End-Users (EUs), the EUs themselves are the greatest source of information when it comes to evaluating your KMS. They interact with the articles more than any other role in your organization and can offer extremely valuable feedback about the efficacy of this resource. End-users will be able to tell you what information is problematic, lacking/missing, or requires restructuring to meet their needs.
Ready to start building your Knowledge Management System? Connect with our Knowledge Management Consultants to develop your KMS Team and help you find the best-fit knowledge base platform to take your operations to the next level.