Starting with Knowledge Management

When organizations are growing, especially in hyper-growth, they oftentimes reach a point where they understand they need some kind of knowledge management, this can be a certain methodology or a chosen tool, but the main point here is that the organization understands that there is priceless knowledge that is stored only in the employees' mind and if they leave or even change a position inside the organization the knowledge can be forever gone.

From my experience, when an organization is arriving at this conclusion - the solution is not to run and purchase a knowledge management tool. The tool is just the frame in which we will store our knowledge, of course, we need to choose the right tool, but for that, we first need to define the why.

What kind of knowledge are we going to manage? Who is expected to consume this knowledge? Who is expected to keep this knowledge up to date? What are our current pain points and what is missing? There are many questions we need to ask ourselves first to make sure we define our needs clearly so the solution we choose will be suitable for our needs.

When starting to think about knowledge management:

First, Define what we need, who will use this, and how.

Second, Define how are you going to manage this, Not just the implementation, but the ongoing knowledge management and updates.

When the first and second step are over you can define the proper solution for your organizational knowledge management.

Published on: LinkedIn