Knowledge management has become a central topic in companies. To help you see more clearly the best practices to implement, we have prepared the knowledge management toolbox.
You will find advice, but also a selection of good software to use to improve your knowledge management.
First, I suggest that you take a step back to measure the stakes and identify the problems to be optimised in your knowledge.
Knowledge management is defined as a set of practices aimed at accelerating and boosting knowledge sharing in an organisation.
In the data age, we are constantly creating, modifying and duplicating data. A lot of information is stored in different tools and is often not shared and therefore not usable for the company.
Thefirst step to remedy this is to move all your documents to cloud solutions and make them accessible to everyone. It seems obvious, but we still regularly see companies where employees create and store documents locally on their computers.
The second step for companies that have already moved to the cloud will be to limit the different tools used to create, store and collaborate on documents.
Indeed, it is not uncommon to see teams collaborating on Sharepoint, others storing documents on Dropbox, or still others using an old tool out of habit.
This will encourage the loss of data in the event of an employee's departure and make inter-team sharing very difficult.
The last step will be to make the documents accessible by providing maximum access.
To sum up: put all your documents on the cloud, centralise everything on the same tool, open up inter-collaborator access rights to break down silos and make the data accessible to all employees.
Most used tools for this need :
Sharepoint, Zeendoc and Google Drive
When you store a large quantity of documents in your company, the question arises as to how to store them.
However, prioritising and classifying data can be complicated to set up and maintain over time.
Here's a tip: restructuring the company's data is a global project, but it should be managed by one person. Indeed, it is tempting to think that all employees will organise themselves and set up a filing system.
But in reality, setting up such a project requires a person to think about the best structure to put in place, to ask everyone to classify their documents, to ensure that everyone has done so, and to ensure that this classification is followed up over time.
Without this, the ranking will be partial, and once employees have identified it, they will tend not to continue playing the game.
To give you an idea of the structure to be put in place, the first step could be to identify clusters.
Example: marketing, sales, operations, HR, etc.
Within each of these clusters, you will be able to determine sub-groups.
Here is an example for the human resources division:
In order to group documents in a useful way, it is interesting to ask yourself these kinds of questions:
Which documents will have recurrent use? (e.g. monitoring table)
What documents will be reused regularly as a basis for others? (e.g. templates)
What documents are useful to give to a newcomer? (e.g.: onboarding)
What tool can help you?
Tools like Sharepoint will be interesting to structure your filing, but this will be limited to Sharepoint.
If you have data in several tools, you can use Outmind, which will allow you to classify your documents, on top of your existing tools.
In concrete terms, you will be able to classify all your documents within Outmind, wherever they are stored (Sharepoint, server, Dropbox, etc).
And you don't have to make any changes to your existing tools, just connect them.
This makes it quick and easy to set up.
Information that is not shared (for the wrong reasons) is information that does not benefit the company.
In companies, a very large proportion of documents are unshared, i.e. only accessible by one person.
To solve this problem, there are 2 solutions:
1/ Everyone shares all their documents with everyone else (risky and rarely implemented).
2/ Make documents accessible to the right people (even in the same division) and allow employees to know whether a document already exists when it is not shared, and who has this document.
On this second point, there is often a major problem of wasted time for the teams. Indeed, employees ask others to find out who might have a particular document. In addition to wasting the time of those who know, we often find ourselves unable to find and having to recreate.
What tool can help you?
Outmind will allow you to identify existing, but unshared documents that match your search.
Outmind will also allow you to identify the most relevant contact person for your needs based on the documents they have created on the subject.
A distinction must be made between these two types of documents:
- Working documents (e.g. a commercial proposal, a follow-up table, etc.)
- Knowledge bases (e.g. organisation chart, tutorial describing step by step how job interviews are conducted, etc.).
The documents that serve as the company's knowledge base are a kind of common knowledge. Everyone will document specific points, so that others can access the information without having to ask.
Tools like Notion are quite interesting to build this knowledge base. The disadvantage is that it makes you use at least two different tools hosting similar documents, if you are already using the tools of the Microsoft 365 suite, for example. This can generate a lot of confusion and errors.
The best practice for finding information stored in all your tools is to use an enterprise search engine that synchronises with all your tools.
Outmind makes it possible to search very efficiently everywhere, to find the right document wherever it is stored.
You can also choose to document your knowledge base in Suite 365 or Google Drive, although these tools are somewhat less suitable for writing articles.
And you can easily structure all these documents in Outmind.
See also the article: Do you need a knowledge base?
Here is a selection of 10 tools to use to improve your knowledge management.
Email exchanges are tending to disappear between employees, but they remain indispensable with customers and people outside the company.
The messaging system has made it considerably easier to exchange information.
Gmail is the most widely used cloud tool that allows businesses to send, receive, translate, organise and schedule emails across different accounts.
Go to Gmail
Outlook is an email application created by Microsoft that offers multiple features to help you manage your incoming and outgoing emails.
Go to Outlook
The instant messaging tool Slack improves business communication. Slack allows you to communicate with the right person quickly by merging communication channels into a single chat. The application offers multiple features and allows you to connect different tools such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Twitter, etc.
Go to Slack
Teams is a secure collaborative working application that allows you to communicate with your colleagues wherever they are.
Go to Teams
To work collaboratively on documents, you need tools that offer many features. They must offer good ergonomics for editing, secure storage of documents and an easy-to-understand interface for employees.
Sharepoint is a communication tool that improves the management of company resources. Sharepoint offers annotation tools, instant messaging, web slides, and other features. You can use it from anywhere with data synchronisation and remote access to documents and contacts.
Go to Sharepoint
Google Drive is the free cloud tool you can't live without. With multiple features such as creating, sharing and editing documents, Google Drive offers the possibility to work collaboratively. Google Drive also has a paid plan if you want more possibilities.
Go to Google Drive
The Zeendoc tool is an EDM (electronic document management) that allows you to find information quickly. The solution collects, classifies and shares the documents available to the company.
Go to Zeendoc
Knowledge bases allow the sharing of the different knowledge of teams to create value. Each player in the company can access it and thus improve his or her skills without having to call on his or her colleagues.
Here are our favourites in terms of practicality and design:
Notion is a cloud-based project management tool. It allows companies and individuals to plan tasks, create and share notes and databases.
Go to Notion
Confluence is a collaborative work software that allows you to centralise information. You can find a document, modify it and share it again.
Go to Confluence
To search efficiently in all your corporate tools at once, you need a dedicated search tool. Such a tool connects to all your sources and provides an optimised search experience to find the right document quickly.
Outmind is a search engine using artificial intelligence, to search all your tools (Sharepoint, Dropbox, emails, servers, Teams, etc.).
And it's all on top of your tools, so you can configure it in minutes without having to change your data.
Employees will be more efficient at finding the right information quickly. They will therefore be more responsive to customers.
A knowledge base could also be connected to a chatbot, to automatically respond to customer queries and thus reduce the time spent on simple and repetitive problems.
According to the Gartner report, this could reduce response times by 20-80% and thus boost productivity and customer satisfaction.
Employees will be more autonomous and you will enable them to find the right information quickly. It is by creating a relationship of trust with your employees that you can see an improvement in productivity.
Not having to ask a staff member where a document is is a time and money saver for both the person asking and the person being asked.
In some cases, "knowers" may spend several hours a week redirecting people to the right information.
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