How to Implement a Knowledge Management System in Your Organization

Maximizing customer satisfaction means giving your staff the tools, documents, and information they need to quickly address problems. Old-school techniques like hard-copy documents and binders make this challenging because each staff member must know exactly where to look when an issue arises. To streamline these processes, many companies are turning to knowledge management systems. Learn more about what they are and how to integrate one into your organization.

What Is a Knowledge Management System?

A knowledge management system is a customer support solution that gathers and retrieves information, enabling businesses to increase understanding, communication, and collaboration throughout departments. It allows employees to increase client satisfaction by finding the right information at the right time.

Steps for Developing a Knowledge Management Strategy

Investing in a knowledge management system is a major decision for a business and requires careful planning and organization to ensure all relevant content is included. Here are the steps you should follow when developing your strategy:

Step One: Determine the Project’s Goal and Objectives

An effective knowledge management system helps business owners streamline operations and enhance how their staff interacts with customers. However, to achieve that result, it’s crucial to determine the project’s objectives and identify the short- and long-term goals.

Pinpointing what you want out of the knowledge management systems helps guide the process and create a strategy that best suits the needs of your organization.

Step Two: Begin Adapting Your Management Strategy

Implementing a knowledge management system means your staff will have to learn a new way of capturing and sharing knowledge. This is a delicate transition because some tenured employees may be resistant to learning a new program.

Taking time to reach out to employees across all levels to alert them of the upcoming change and list the benefits of the move helps ease their anxiety and build anticipation.

Step Three: Finalize Your Processes

How is knowledge created, categorized, and shared throughout your organization? Understanding how the process works now allows you to pinpoint inefficiencies and create a knowledge management strategy that meets your needs.

Failing to define your various processes properly makes meeting your defined goals and objectives challenging.

Step Four: Include Leadership

Your organization’s leadership team should be included in the early stages of the implementation process. They should understand the goals and objectives of the project and be active in every step.

Group participation shows the rest of the company how important the process is to the entire organization and helps increase buy-in.

Step Five: Assess Your Current System

Your new knowledge management system should outperform your current method. To ensure this happens, carefully assess how your current strategy works. Identify gaps and pinpoint areas of improvement; this helps you create a successful knowledge management transition and enhance processes for your staff.

Step Six: Determine Capabilities

Knowing which capabilities you want from your enterprise knowledge management system enables you to maximize the return on investment. Consider how you want to gather knowledge, where it is stored, what feed methods you want, and how you want to measure performance.

Step Seven: Create a Roadmap

After assessing your existing system and determining what you want from your new knowledge management platform, you can begin building an implementation roadmap. This should include the project’s scope and feature any key milestones.

When creating your roadmap, focus on early successes during the implementation phase. This helps generate excitement with your staff and increases enthusiasm.

Step Eight: Implement Your Knowledge Management System

All the hard work done in the previous seven steps prepares you for the most important one—implementation. An important part of this step is reminding your employees that it’s a process and there might be some minor problems in the near future. This reminds them about the long-term goals of the project and keeps their spirits high.

Step Nine: Measure Effectiveness

You’ll never know if your new knowledge management system is working unless you measure its effectiveness and results. Tracking key performance indicators and speaking with staff members about their experiences and recommendations for improvement help increase productivity.

Step Ten: Make Regular Adjustments

A knowledge management strategy is a continuously evolving operation requiring regular adjustments to meet your needs consistently. Tracking metrics and communicating with your team members helps enhance how they interact with customers and scale operations.

Need Help Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Platform?

Check out our latest blog about how to properly measure the results of your knowledge management platform.

Learn More

Build Your Enterprise Knowledge Management System With Collected Thoughts

Constructing and implementing a knowledge management system is a complex task and requires expert knowledge of various processes. Partnering with a reputable company ensures you receive the best platform for your needs.

Collected Thoughts works with businesses across the country to implement a PANVIVA®-based platform that allows their staff to find the right information at the time. Our experts handle all elements of the design and launch process, including:

Implementation

Implementation is the foundation of a successful knowledge management platform. Our experts collect and organize the content your employees use and develop a system that best suits your needs. We also interview your staff to understand your organization’s best practices and processes.

Content Development

Enhancing how your staff interacts with customers means providing content that is concisely written and easy to read. Our internal writing team creates new copy and updates existing documents to increase your process flows. We’re capable of completing the writing process in as little as 12 weeks and ensure accuracy by interviewing subject matter experts.

Go-Live Support

Implementing a new knowledge management system is an exciting time for your business, but a lack of familiarity can cause some minor issues. We offer go-live support services that provide troubleshooting tips to reduce downtime when problems develop.

Enhance Customer Interactions With Collected Thoughts

The business knowledge your organization possesses is unique, and leveraging it allows your company to stay competitive. Collected Thoughts has over 10 years of experience with PANVIVA® and uses our expertise to create a platform that enables your staff to find the right information at the right time. Contact us today to learn more about measuring training effectiveness with our team.

Contact Collected Thoughts today to start building your knowledge management strategy.