Good knowledge management (KM) can boost productivity, prevent knowledge loss, and increase the effectiveness of onboarding and product adoption. Without good KM, you’re making life more difficult for your company and employees than it needs to be, as they struggle to find information they need in order to do their jobs.
To do this, you need a clearly defined knowledge management strategy.
But here's the catch: designing a strong KM strategy is a detailed process with many moving parts. It can quickly get overwhelming and derail your efforts. We've compiled this exhaustive guide to help you create a robust KM strategy that skyrockets productivity, strengthens decision-making, and democratizes knowledge.
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What is a knowledge management strategy?
A knowledge management strategy defines how an organization captures and reuses knowledge as a strategic asset. It lays down a team’s KM goals and creates a roadmap to identify gaps, use available resources, and accomplish these objectives.
A well-defined strategy lies at the core of successful knowledge management systems. It leads an organization’s KM function in the right direction to get the best out of their process.
3 components of knowledge management strategy
A knowledge management strategy ideally includes three main elements: people, processes, and technology. Let’s break down each of them.
1. People
Designing a solid KM strategy starts with finding the right people to create and implement it. The end goals for every KM strategy closely align with the needs, competencies, and challenges of people within an organization.
While strategizing your knowledge management process, you should aim to:
- Identify the biggest roadblocks facing the team
- Source knowledge from the right people to build shared expertise
- Enable employees to consume and share knowledge
Put simply, a KM strategy hinges on the people in your organization. The more closely they’re involved in the planning, the better.
2. Processes
You’ve designed a detailed KM strategy after hours of brainstorming and research. But the real struggle begins when you start the process with the team—without any flow of operations. Even the most intricately defined knowledge management strategies can fail without airtight processes for execution.
Processes create a streamlined flow to implement your strategy from start to finish—to capture, organize, reuse, and share knowledge. Creating processes for your strategy also ensures more consistency, seamless adoption, and greater accessibility.
3. Technology
Technology is an enabler in the KM process, allowing teams to share and store knowledge more effectively. Tools for knowledge management simplify and accelerate the process of knowledge transfer.
For instance, a solution like Stonly enhances content creation with a no-code editor to design available anywhere (including within employee applications) knowledge bases and interactive guides rather than long, exhaustive articles. You can also manage documents, get in-depth user feedback, and moderate permissions to let anyone share knowledge. It's a feature-packed platform to maximize collaboration, centralize knowledge, and deliver a great user experience.
Technology helps keep everyone on the same page. It also lets you deliver knowledge across the entire workforce without friction or productivity drops.
How to build an effective knowledge management strategy
Every organization defines knowledge differently. This variation means there's no template to design a KM strategy that meets your team's needs. But a few proven best practices can prepare a solid groundwork to create a fail-proof plan and ensure your initiatives get results.
Let’s look at six such best practices to follow for knowledge management:
1. Define roles for a knowledge management team
Start by assembling a team responsible for creating, implementing, and monitoring your KM strategy. This team would be responsible for understanding the organizational goals, auditing available resources, and building systems for knowledge management.
Define every member's role within the KM team to improve collaboration and decision-making. Here are a few positions to consider:
- People finding and collecting knowledge
- People organizing and creating content
- People fine-tuning the content for the end user
- People setting the goals and monitoring the team
Divide key responsibilities among these members to get the best out of their skill sets and work effectively.
2. Establish your goals and prioritize them
Identifying the right goals is one of the most critical steps when designing an effective KM strategy. You can set relevant (and realistic) goals and win the stakeholders’ buy-in only when you have a solid business case for every goal. To do that, start by analyzing all the available documentation and understanding the gaps and opportunities.
Conduct a knowledge audit to get a rundown on:
- Existing resources used within the company and quick wins to improve them
- The current flow of knowledge transfer from SMEs and leadership to employees and major pain points that need to be addressed
- Overall weaknesses and opportunities in the program
This information will give you a clear picture of the company's current KM capabilities and pinpoint the areas for improvement. Review these details to establish a list of your knowledge management goals. Then prioritize these objectives based on their overall significance to the organization.
3. Create a knowledge management process
Once you’ve set up a solid team and finalized key objectives, focus on shaping a seamless process for collecting, creating, and sharing your company’s knowledge. This is one of the biggest drivers of success for any KM strategy because the process lays down exactly how you’ll produce and deliver the right content to the right people.
A solid KM process includes systems for:
- Knowledge capture and organization: Define how you’ll collect knowledge from individuals or scattered documents and organize it in a single place with a knowledge flow. This repeatable process ensures that you don’t bottle up crucial knowledge in silos and make it more accessible.
- Content creation framework: A KM strategy is only as good as the quality of documentation you can produce. So, prepare a set of guidelines and an approval process to create reader-friendly and interactive knowledge assets while meeting all quality benchmarks.
- Accessing SMEs: Set up processes for your KM team to capture relevant information from the most experienced employees. This can include a system for taking interviews, questionnaires, or anything that helps unlock the tacit knowledge of your subject matter experts.
Pro tip: Stonly’s step-by-step guides make creating personalized content for an internal knowledge base easy. It's an easy solution to level up your documentation game and make KM content that’s relevant to each employee’s needs!
You can't overlook the effectiveness of your content creation process if you want to succeed at knowledge management. Dana Tessier, the Director of Knowledge Management at Shopify, agrees and considers content an essential link in the chain. She says:
“You need to make sure that it's answering people's questions, it's there for them when they need it. It gives them the information they need to do their jobs. And then you can use technology to enhance that process.”
4. Design a plan for effective communication
The success or failure of your knowledge management initiatives also depends on how well you deliver this knowledge to employees. A complicated and confusing process to access knowledge can demotivate them. In contrast, a user-focused flow of knowledge transfer can maximize your KM outputs.
Here are a few handy tips for communicating knowledge more effortlessly:
- Segment resources into broader subjects, like departments and processes within departments. You could even use Stonly to ask employees to self-select their department, use case, and other factors that would help you deliver content that’s most relevant to their situation.
- Incorporate your internal knowledge base within the internal websites and applications employees use daily. For example, your HR tool is an excellent place to incorporate benefits knowledge and important announcements.
- Focus your documentation efforts around the search functionality to offer easy navigation.
- Perform a beta test to understand user feedback and make modifications before a full-fledged launch
Remember to identify potential risks or issues in the communication process and ideate solutions beforehand. You can also set guidelines for effective communication before rolling out your KM program to bring everyone on the same page.
5. Pick a knowledge management tool
The right knowledge management tool can be a gamechanger in storing and sharing information within the organization. Build your company's internal knowledge base using an advanced solution like Stonly to do more with your content.
Stonly is a versatile tool designed to make content consumption hassle-free and content creation easy. Here’s what you can do with Stonly:
- Produce interactive guides to maximize learner retention and engagement.
- Create an org-wide knowledge ecosystem on a single platform and nurture a knowledge-sharing culture.
- Level up your documents with interactive elements and multimedia using a no-code editor.
- Enjoy complete customization with intuitive tools to add your branding to your knowledge base.
- Designate content creation rights to relevant employees and track different versions of all content.
- Embed knowledge directly into internal websites and applications employees use daily and provide knowledge personalized to each page they’re on.
A knowledge management tool is more than a nice-to-have at a time when employees feel fatigued by the effort required to access the smallest of information. Make life easy for them and yourself with Stonly.
6. Personalize the knowledge-sharing experience
Personalizing your employee experience is another great way to ace your KM strategy. This personalization level is about cutting all the noise to make the employee experience more focused by giving them the help articles to answer their specific questions. A tool like Stonly can help you provide step-by-step guides that make this information easier to follow than a traditional wall of text.
Help content can also be personalized based on where the employee is seeking knowledge. For instance, if they’re seeking knowledge while in the HR portal, help content can be focussed on relevant HR topics as soon as the employee opens the widget.
You should identify which positions need access to what resources and moderate their access to your content accordingly. For instance, a marketing team member should have access to all the org-wide resources and those specifically designed for the marketing department.
Make your KM strategy fail-proof
Designing a knowledge management strategy is no cakewalk. You need a clear picture of the organizational goals and gaps to establish laser-focused objectives and shape a doable action plan.
If you're building or revamping your KM strategy from the ground up, start by putting together a good team and performing a knowledge audit. Then ideate a framework for content creation and communication for the success of your KM roadmap. Make sure you pick the right tool to deliver the content well and collect user feedback for consistent improvement.
Build an internal knowledge base that your team will love with Stonly. Replace static articles with interactive guides that lead employees to exactly what they’re looking for.
Sign up today.
Frequently asked questions about knowledge management strategy
1. What are the steps in knowledge management strategy?
Here are the most crucial steps in a knowledge management strategy:
- Create a knowledge management team
- Perform a knowledge audit and set goals
- Define a knowledge management process
- Plan for communicating the KM process
- Select a good KM tool
2. What are the four key processes of knowledge management?
Knowledge management includes four key processes: discovery, capture, sharing, and application. Let’s break them down here:
- Knowledge discovery is about making knowledge easily discoverable
- Knowledge capture is about collecting the right knowledge from every avenue
- Knowledge sharing is about organizing and delivering knowledge
- Knowledge application is about implementing the knowledge received
3. What is the need for a knowledge management strategy?
A knowledge management strategy sets the proper foundation for any KM program. It outlines the goals, metrics, and plan of action to make the KM function successful within the organization. This strategy also makes knowledge transfer more collaborative, consistent, and efficient.
4. What is the difference between knowledge management and knowledge management strategy?
Knowledge management is capturing, organizing, reusing, and storing knowledge within a team. On the other hand, a knowledge management strategy is a plan of action to execute a KM program and succeed.
