Knowledge Governance: The Key to Knowledge Management Success
The basis of a knowledge management system is that it is efficient, predictive, and all-encompassing — but a knowledge platform needs structure and control for it to truly be all of these things and more; that’s where the most vital knowledge management practice comes in: knowledge governance.
Laying the Foundation for Knowledge Management Governance
Knowledge governance is a process to ensure the success of your Knowledge Management platform. After all, if there’s no oversight and control, users will inevitably go back to what they’re most familiar with—their old, siloed filing systems and document management tools. It makes sense, provides consistency for maintaining knowledge across each team collection, and has the flexibility to grow as your organization grows.
Companies constantly experiencing changes and evolving can benefit the most from a knowledge management system, but it’s the governance that ensures the correct and most up-to-date information is being published and accessed by the right people. Not all information is meant for or pertinent to every individual; hierarchies exist within companies for a reason.
Part of the governance process is restricting content to those requiring it to perform their tasks accurately and efficiently. This is done by clearly defining roles within the company and building their appropriate access permissions into the knowledge management platform. These roles and limitations to content are not only to contain sensitive information, but also to deliver abbreviated or more digestible nuggets of information across channels. This purposeful method of information dissemination is more beneficial to employees and customers than large amounts of uncurated text.
Compliance Driven Knowledge
The implementation of new information is key in producing compliance-driven knowledge, which is part of the larger knowledge management governance process. In addition, to a formal review prior to publishing new content, reviewing current versions of knowledge is also a vital part of the compliance process.
Selecting an internal knowledge base tool or system that allows for previous iterations of knowledge to be archived allows for version control and an audit trail which are both key when implementing a compliance-driven aspect of the governance process.
Knowledge Management Reporting & Software
Your knowledge management platform should include robust reporting and dashboard capabilities. Reporting is used to track who is accessing what and how often. The dashboards can be built from the underlying reporting feature. These two functions allow leaders to “inspect what they expect” while also incentivizing employees that are most utilizing the knowledge-based system.
The 4 Vital Ingredients
There are four vital ingredients to guaranteeing the full and ongoing benefits from your Knowledge Management Software:
1. Establish the optimal Knowledge Management team.
Building a knowledge management system requires collaboration between various departments and experts. It can’t be done in a vacuum, and it requires constant attention to maintain accuracy and efficiency over time. Develop the optimal KMS team build using our framework for a team structure that can achieve maximum ROI on your KMS investment.
2. Define and formalize your knowledge guidelines.
Your knowledge management platform is a living, ever-evolving entity. It needs to be subject to verification, review cycles, and developments within your organization. Therefore, your guidelines are policies and procedures that provide a strong framework for the use of your knowledge-based system and how to incorporate new knowledge and changes to existing knowledge.
3. Provide continued and explicit support for the correct usage of the knowledge management system.
Begin building the buy-in and support for your knowledge database utilization early and often in training. Once training is complete, continue to reinforce the behavior by encouraging users to check the information sharing platform for answers to any questions they may ask that can be answered by the system. Remind your supervisors to direct their employees to the KMS with consistency instead of providing the answer themselves.
4. Remain alert for old behaviors and inspect what you expect.
Solicit feedback from your end users and key stakeholders to ensure the knowledge content is up to date and is an easily consumable format. Also, create reports and a dashboard to track utilization in your organization, department, team, and individual users.
Continuous Improvement of Knowledge Management Processes and Workflows
Your knowledge governance guidelines should define the processes and workflows and provide templates and terminology for developing and implementing new content (consider a style guide). They should also include the content approval process, version control, and user training. A consistent, recurring review of these processes and workflows ensures that the best content is available to its users at all times and maintains consistent and high quality.
Ready to start building your Knowledge Management System for your call center operations? Our Knowledge Management Consultants are here to help you unlock the potential of your knowledge system with a governance process. Connect with us today.