Network Rail 
Arup 
Oxford Brookes University 
NHS 
SSE 
Future Shift 
Highly-effective businesses, with consistent service quality levels, are invariably underpinned by a knowledge management system. A well-implemented knowledge management system (KMS) enables you to integrate and unify cross-functional work practices, to assure your project/service delivery and to transform disparate, individual knowledge into a powerful corporate-wide asset. Before jumping into the selection and embedment of a new knowledge management system, however, it is important to have an understanding of the key feature-benefits you should look for.
The importance of choosing the right knowledge management system (KMS)
Your KMS will be your central, go-to repository for all relevant company data, enriched with information that connects employees through mutual process, objectives, and insights. Enabling task management, safety, quality and accountability within your line of work, a KMS will organise and guide your business to continuously meet best practices and hone excellent operational efficiencies. For highly projectized businesses, the right KMS decision is a critical foundation of overall project (and service delivery) capability. Finding a solution that builds upon your organisation’s quality management systems, operational frameworks, and assurance capabilities is important. A knowledge management system should:
Promote shareability
Reduce knowledge loss
Improve decision making
Contribute to innovation
Ensure individual turnover doesn’t affect organisational knowledge
Enhance productivity
Offer clarity and oversight of entire programmes
Enable continuous service improvement
Empower continuous learning and evolution
Support integrated project assurance To reap these benefits, and more, from your knowledge management system, the below features are fundamental.
Four must-have knowledge management feature-benefits
1. Expert tagging Having a bank of centralised knowledge resource is key but a KMS becomes really powerful when it facilitates colleague-to-colleague connectivity also. Expert tagging enables a user to find and notify expert colleagues quickly and efficiently – essentially it serves as the facilitative enablement of collaborative cultures. If you don’t have the answer to your current technical challenge, a KMS can provide guidance/tools/templates and also signposts to who in the wider organisation is best placed to support you with such a question.
2. Collaboration and knowledge sharing An established knowledge management framework helps organisations to build a network of active communication, learning, and insight sharing. A KMS is far more than a document repository; a key feature will be the collaboration it enables (comments, @notifications) across all layers of the solution – framework development, knowledge artefacts, assigned tasks etc. This form of feature set enables a community of practice to form around the continuous creation and development of shared knowledge resources.
3. Solution customisation Customisation might, from the outside, sound a bit like a trivial, added bonus to a KMS. Customisation, however, is key to making your organisation’s knowledge management system specific to its needs. Every organisation will have their own, unique task structure and operational processes. Having a knowledge management system that allows for customisable layouts, element-labelling and bespoke templates will empower your methodologies. Customisation allows you to visually-present service and project lifecycles as tailored to your own unique brand and approach.
4. Intellectual property security A knowledge management system will contain a vast amount of company data. Responsible for so much organisational knowledge, a coherent knowledge management system must have security and data integrity deeply embedded within every aspect of the system. Including access control features, your KMS should have industry-standard secure socket layer encryption and authentication procedures to ensure controlled access your intellectual property. Your KMS provider should be based on industry-leading infrastructure with respect to data security features, trustworthy content backups etc. Read more about best practices of implementing KM
A knowledge management system to optimise your operations
One of the key assets of any successful, high-growth organisation is its knowledge base. As such, it is important to choose a knowledge management system that not only aligns with your internal processes but has features that helps unleash insights and captures an ever-improving body of best practice. Possessing the four key features above, such a KMS quickly becomes the backbone of quality organisation. If you would like to integrate a contemporary, tech-enabled knowledge management solution into your system infrastructure, then get in touch with Method Grid today. We can assist you in building confidence in your projects, people, and methodologies.
