While agile knowledge management is relatively a new concept, this is how KM processes should have been in the first place. What does it mean? Is it the right way to manage knowledge in your organization? What’s wrong with the system already in place?
We will answer all these questions and much more in this blog post. Let’s get cracking.
What Is Agile Knowledge Management?
Organizations that have successfully incorporated the agile principles and values have achieved a flexible and more scalable business that customers love. If you add ‘knowledge management’ to that manifesto, you will get agile KM.
Agility in the context of knowledge management means processes and tools designed to address actual business needs rather than generic rules that are only good on paper, speedily. Rather than being set in stone, agile KM constantly evolves and stays relevant to changing company requirements and is aligned with business goals for maximizing outcomes. All in all, it is ‘personalizing’ and developing a responsive KM strategy for your business that generates quick results.
What’s Lacking in the Traditional KM Approach?
Back in the day, traditional knowledge management served its purpose well. Now, it is redundant, inefficient, and ineffective. The table below explains how:
| Traditional Knowledge Management | Agile Knowledge Management |
|---|---|
Face-to-Face Sharing: When you’re dealing with knowledge management for your whole company, relying on meetings for knowledge transfer eats up both parties’ times. | Digital Sharing: Employees who need to learn, irrespective of whether they are new or due to changes in software applications being used, are provided on-demand tutorials to access at their own convenience. |
Q+A Session: When the KT session is delivered to a group of employees, the Q/A session is reserved for the end. New employees can feel shy to ask questions. | Real-time Answers: A better solution is digital learning platforms integrated with collaboration tools or chatbots that let employees ask questions as and when they want to. It also keeps a track of previous learnings and personalizes recommendations for individual employees. |
Lesser Control: Self-service is a pivotal part of KM too. If your employees have to rely on experienced colleagues or disorganized information that makes it hard to learn on their own, it will drain and disengage them. | Empowered Employees: If KM tools offer intuitive, user-friendly, and in-the-moment guidance, employees will be empowered and motivated to make KCS a part of the work culture. |
Additional Time: Traditional KM gives the idea that KB creation for future use needs extra employee efforts that are not part of their direct role. | Automated Knowledge Creation: Agile KM uses tools that automate the creation of KB articles as support engineers solve issues, keeping manual efforts to a bare minimum. |
Principles to Inculcate Agility in Your Knowledge Management Processes
1. Embrace the Change
Your knowledge management requirements will evolve with time. Agile KM means your processes are designed and braced by innovative tech that supports the constant changes. The strategy should be responsive and adaptive rather than following a perfect plan laid out in the rule book. Hence, knowledge managers should be abreast of the latest apps and tools that support this principle. They can start by exploring on-demand webinars related to it.
2. (Re)focus on Results
Laying out rules and best practices won’t do you much good if you’re unable to quantify your KM efforts. An ideal knowledge management solution should offer a way to measure KCS, for instance, reports that reveal the number of articles created over time and how effective they are. To add on, it should list top contributing agents so that knowledge managers can appreciate or reward them to promote agile KM values.
3. Prioritize Simple and Holistic Solutions
Tech-enabled knowledge management should streamline processes and offer a one-shop stop to employees for KM. Rather than investing in a solution that reinvents your entire knowledge infrastructure, go for the one that improves knowledge linkage and creation through existing organizational workflows. The solution should be simple to use, scalable, and streamlined for your processes.
4. Improve Continuously
Nothing is perfect: there’s always scope for improvement. That’s why organizations need to identify and fill knowledge content gaps. Knowledge management solutions should offer an easy way to identify issues causing tickets so that necessary self-service content is prepared to help end-users.
5. Align Technical Processes With Business Goals
Knowledge management practices can’t be thrust upon technical staff or support engineers. The management and knowledge engineers need to work together to identify actual business needs and accordingly decide on a knowledge management solution that fulfills them.
Want to Enable Agile Knowledge Management? Hear From Experts Who Coined the Term ‘KCS’
Getting knowledge management right is something many organizations grapple with. That’s why we are delivering a virtual webinar with KCS Academy’s Arnfinn Austefjord to discuss how to improve knowledge linkage through existing organizational workflows and remediate content gaps effectively on January 26, 2021. Click here to register.
Not sure if you’re free that day? Register anyway and get access to the webinar on-demand for a limited time. Hurry, the clock is ticking!
