You have almost certainly experienced the symptoms in your company. A decision is made on the basis of incomplete facts, which only come to light later. Staff members spend ages researching a topic without realizing that someone in another department already has the expertise. Time is money and a lot of it is wasted. You soon start to wonder if there is any cure for these symptoms, in the form of knowledge management software.
This cure does exist, because the disease that causes these symptoms is lack of knowledge sharing. Probably every single member of your organization has some valuable knowledge, but you have very little idea what is out there. This combined store of knowledge, or intellectual capital, could be of incalculable value to the company, yet you have limited means of tapping into it, and when staff members have a question, it is not easy for them to find the answer, even if it’s there. And then employees leave or go sick, and take their knowledge with them.
Is Knowledge Sharing the Cure?
If you could find the cure, in the form of a really effective means of knowledge sharing, the result could be a dramatic improvement in your organizational performance, across every aspect of your business. For a start, it will obviously lead to reduced costs and greater efficiency, because of time saved by speedy access to information. It will also result in much greater efficiency in decision making and problem solving, because all the required knowledge will be available.
Apart from this, it can make a crucial difference to relationships, both internal, with employees, and external — for example with customers. Few things annoy customers more than finding they are talking to a different person who knows nothing about their previous call. With proper knowledge sharing, not only will their information be instantly to hand, but their problems can be solved much more promptly. Employee needs are often overlooked, but if they know their issues are taken on board, they feel empowered, and the result can be a big jump in productivity.
Of course, it may be that you have been aware of this malaise for some time, and tried some remedies for knowledge sharing, but found none of them really effective. For instance, you may have tried a content management system, but found it was insufficiently user friendly to enable full staff participation. What you need is a system to which every member of staff has easy access, and to which everyone can contribute at any time, as well as using it to find their answers.
How Comprehensive Knowledge Management Software Can Help
The ideal cure for your problem is a comprehensive piece of knowledge management software, which puts together the features of all the different solutions which you may have tried. Such a tool must be sufficiently powerful to pull all your knowledge requirements together, and put the entire intellectual capital of the whole organization at the disposal of everyone. This can be enough to revolutionize your productivity, your profitability and your competitive edge.
If your business is like most at the present time, you will be under a lot of pressure, trying to stay competitive in the face of rising costs and an uncertain economy. A knowledge management software solution as powerful as this could soon cut your costs and turn your business round. This could be the medicine that the doctor ordered.
