Knowledge overview

Good knowledge management makes knowledge available to every employee at the point when it will best help them to offer a particular product or service. Making practical knowledge available to employees, when and where they need it, produces real and significant gains.

Customers and end-users also benefit when they have direct access to a knowledge base to solve their own issues. A growing number of people now prefer self-service to live interaction: they are in a hurry and need a specific piece of information quickly. In this case, self-service can be superior to analyst-assisted service.

Gathering knowledge

Once you have decided that you are ready to implement knowledge management, the first thing to do is to identify knowledge sources.

It is a good idea to create ‘product champions’ to identify knowledge sources, examine knowledge usefulness, and to ensure that the content is suitable.

The challenge of knowledge management is to determine what information within your organization is valuable. Creating the knowledge database requires that you identify the useful knowledge that you currently have and the knowledge that you will need in the future to support your customers and your business.

Knowledge can come from many sources. It may be in the heads of skilled employees, it may be existing technical documentation, solutions and workarounds. All of this information needs to be in the knowledge database, so that it is available to everyone.