What Is Knowledge Management and Why Does It Matter?

Knowledge is essential for every company. By capturing knowledge, organizations can better leverage their collective knowledge to achieve strategic objectives, improve performance, foster innovation and drive new initiatives. Knowledge management has been around for a long time and is now poised for a significant transformation with the advent of intelligent technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing and knowledge graphs. How well organizations capture, store, share and manage their collective knowledge determines their success or failure in achieving their business goals.

What Is Knowledge Management?

IDC describes knowledge management (KM) as “technologies and processes designed to enable organizational insights and meet business objectives by capturing, creating, sharing, using, and accessing knowledge. Additionally, knowledge can be derived from tacit, structured, unstructured, learned, analyzed, or processed information.” KM is important as it helps organizations leverage their biggest asset—their collective knowledge. This encompasses the skills and experiences of employees plus the data and information stored within the organization. But where does knowledge come from?

Organizations work with vast amounts of data typically comprised of raw facts and figures that reside in documents, spreadsheets, wikis, etc. This data cannot drive actionable intelligence unless it’s put in context. Only when you understand your information, can you discover valuable knowledge. The knowledge triangle is a driving force for business growth, illustrating the correlations between data – information – knowledge and the importance of knowledge for driving context and understanding from information.

Credit: TechTarget

By adding more meaning and context to your enterprise data, you can get more knowledge and insights from it, and make better decisions based on that data. To put it simply, the goal of knowledge management is quite simple: give the right information to the right person at the right time to support better, more informed and contextualized decision making. And the ability to make those decisions usually lies deep in a company’s data—particularly, its metadata.

Types of Knowledge Management

To manage knowledge well, it's useful to know that knowledge can be divided into three categories: tacit, implicit and explicit.

• Tacit knowledge: This is the knowledge that people gain from experience and understand instinctively. It is hard to express or explain and hard to share with others. Tacit knowledge can include elements like language, ideas or presentation skills.
• Implicit knowledge: While tacit knowledge is hard to express, implicit knowledge does not have to be. Instead, implicit knowledge—sometimes called "know-how" knowledge—is not yet documented and often resides within procedures.
• Explicit knowledge: Explicit knowledge is stored in different document types, such as manuals, documents and databases, that help organizations share knowledge among teams. This is the most common type of knowledge and reflects information derived from data. This kind of knowledge is important to keep intellectual capital in an organization and make knowledge transfer to new employees easier.

The Knowledge Management Process in Six Steps

1. Knowledge Creation: Construct new knowledge by gaining and analyzing enterprise information, formulating new ideas and applying them to gain insights.
2. Knowledge Capture: Identify and document any existing or new knowledge that your organization wants to circulate across the company. Collect information in a tool or repository so it can be effectively managed.
3. Knowledge Curation: Structure knowledge in a consistent and easy-for-users way by leveraging knowledge organization systems. Taxonomies, ontologies, controlled vocabularies and knowledge models are the stepping stones for adding structure to your organizational knowledge. Learn more about taxonomies.
4. Knowledge Organization: Organize the knowledge in a database that allows easy search and cataloging.
5. Knowledge Sharing: Processes to share the knowledge base are communicated broadly across the organization to stimulate knowledge access, sharing and collaboration. Organizational culture will undoubtedly influence the rate at which information spreads. Companies that encourage and reward this behavior will undoubtedly have a competitive advantage over others in their industry.
6. Knowledge Application: Apply available knowledge to make decisions and perform tasks based on data in context.

Knowledge Management for the Business

Today's workplace needs a structured system for managing knowledge, otherwise, it can be very challenging to understand how information flows in your organization and influences decision making. Employees work more effectively when they have access to the information they need. IBM shows that knowledge workers spend about 2.5 hours per day, or roughly 30% of a workday, searching for information. Being unable to find the information they need, may lead to frustration and inefficiency.

According to IDC figures, 80% of data within an organization will be unstructured by 2025. Yet, for the majority of organizations around the world, most decisions are based on the 20% of data that is structured. This raises an interesting question: is that 20% sufficiently representative? By relying on that 20% are we making the same decisions as everyone else, not differentiating ourselves and leaving massive opportunities on the table? Opportunities to make money by making better decisions, opportunities to save money by having more insight into our operations, and opportunities to stay compliant—or at least avoid big fines—by understanding risk and exposure.

Companies are struggling to effectively manage their knowledge, as conventional business intelligence platforms typically don’t extend to unstructured data and business knowledge is often scattered across the organization and implemented in silos and within the application logic. An insight gap arises as employees extract facts from complex data without interpretations available to understand how and why they influence their business activities.

Knowledge management is critical for organizations looking to leverage their data for business-critical decision making. According to IDC research, of the large-sized companies (500 employees or more) where knowledge management has been implemented, only 45% of employees are using it. The report indicates that this percentage will rise to 55% after two years, showing a steady increase in the use of knowledge management tools in organizations.

Knowledge Management Tools

Organizations can achieve fundamental transformations across key areas by leveraging their data strategically. Different methods for creating or obtaining a knowledge management system are available to organizations. Which method is chosen depends on the computational scale needed to keep, protect, arrange and access information elements. Some organizations rely on more conventional approaches. Bigger organizations dealing with vast amounts of data rely on more robust and sophisticated knowledge organization structures to support knowledge management more effectively at scale.

Semantic technologies are transformative in helping organizations turn data into information and information into knowledge. By using semantic AI capabilities to apply detailed metadata, organizations can establish a knowledge-centric database that makes sense—laying the groundwork for future-oriented solutions, search and AI.

Benefits of Knowledge Management

Knowledge management systems equip individuals and departments with knowledge. By adding context, meaning and understanding to your data and harmonizing your business vocabulary, your organization can make decisions based on information that aligns with business goals.

• Faster decision making: Employees can make faster decisions when they have the right knowledge at their fingertips. They can avoid wasting time repeating what has already been done because they can leverage previous decisions and the shared wisdom of others.
• Drive a better user experience: Get the right information to the right people at the right time. Facilitate access to insights and power new opportunities by enabling easy access and sharing of knowledge.
• Deliver better business results: Businesses can enhance their agility by exchanging knowledge that can drive insights, which help them to identify problems faster and innovate more effectively.
• Support new initiatives: Leverage enterprise knowledge to spark ideas and foster collaboration. Enable sophisticated data analysis and drive AI initiatives by adding structure to your complex and siloed data.
• Quick and easy retrieval of knowledge: Employees waste a lot of their work time looking for information that should be easy to find. KM can help employees retrieve knowledge quickly and easily, so they can devote more of their time to tasks that have a direct impact on business outcomes.
• Sustain organizational knowledge: Organizations build up valuable knowledge over time. Knowledge management systems support organizations in preserving this institutional knowledge, preventing the loss of vital knowledge and promoting long-term organizational stability.

Semaphore and Knowledge Management

To remain competitive, enterprises must get insights and make decisions based on knowledge, derived from both structured and unstructured information. With Progress Semaphore, organizations get an enterprise-scalable, business-oriented, feature-rich product that enables them to generate and apply knowledge rapidly and accurately.

Semaphore simplifies knowledge management practices by providing the tools and technologies to collaboratively create and harmonize business concepts, relationships and meaning using standards-based knowledge models. Knowledge modeling enables companies to create a complete view of organizational information that streamlines business processes, minimizes customer confusion and enhances productivity. A key element of Semaphore is that it allows you to create and manage knowledge models.

With Semaphore organizations can apply these knowledge models to content and analyze structured and unstructured information to identify and extract hidden facts and relationships in content.

By transforming data into meaningful, actionable intelligence, Semaphore enables organizations to adapt, innovate and thrive in an ever-changing landscape, extending the use and reach of knowledge across the enterprise.

Real-Life Case Study of Knowledge Management in Healthcare

In this Progress case study, a healthcare company faced challenges in preventing fall accidents among seniors. They had data stored across various platforms in diverse formats, stuctures and nomenclatures. To solve this problem, they implemented the Semaphore semantic AI platform. This platform helped them leverage predictive analytics to identify individuals at risk of falling to improve patient care and reduce healthcare costs.

Semaphore Knowledge Model Management (KMM) was used to leverage public ontology that was later expanded with additional concepts around incidents and environmental hazards. The detailed model of the problem space was used to enable the Classification and Language Services module in Semaphore to extract facts from unstructured, semi-structured and structured content including doctor’s records, social worker reports and comments from caregivers and visiting nurses. The resulting information was ingested into a graph database for further analysis and integrated with business applications to support physicians’ and other providers’ routine reviews of the patient record.

As a result, the healthcare agency experienced significant improvements in detecting patients at risk, allowing them to minimize hazards and reduce the rate of falls by 87%. It also yielded approximately 18 million dollars in savings. The model management, auto-classification and fact-extraction technologies in Semaphore were pivotal in transforming scattered enterprise data into actionable intelligence. This not only streamlined knowledge management processes but also empowered the organization to make data-driven business decisions that improve the quality of care and patient outcomes while reducing costs.

Conclusion

Managing organizational knowledge is vital for businesses that want to leverage their human capital, maintain organizational information and foster innovation. Knowledge management enables organizations to use a structured process for applying and preserving enterprise knowledge for present and future purposes. By managing knowledge effectively, you can improve your decision-making process and achieve tangible advantages for your company, such as increased efficiency, more innovation, data-driven decision-making and higher customer satisfaction. You can respond to rapidly changing market conditions by making existing knowledge accessible and useful in a well-organized data repository.

To discover what Progress Semaphore can do for your organization, visit our website or contact us directly.