Analyzing Your Corporate Knowledge Base

The fundamental objective of your knowledge management system (KMS) is to supply all your employees with knowledge that they need to maximize their performance in their responsibility areas. Therefore, your corporate knowledge base (CKB) must be comprehensive in a sense that it should contain all this knowledge and make it all accessible. At any moment in time.

Obviously, it must also have the optimal structure – for generating, storing, accessing and disseminating knowledge. No ‘information lacunas’, but no excessive content as well. ‘Information overload’ can sometimes be worse than lack of necessary knowledge.

No less obviously, all your CKB components must be tightly integrated. And your CKB itself must be tightly integrated into your overall corporate management system and match your corporate information strategy.

In other words, your corporate knowledge base must become a ‘knowledge continent’ instead of ‘information archipelago’ (as is currently the case with practically all business entities and other organizations). All its content must be complete, connected and accessible. Which will require utilization of an optimal architecture (formats, standards, etc.) for your corporate knowledge base.

To achieve this objective, we first need to give a precise definition of knowledge and how it is different from data and information. Data refers to elementary building blocks – ‘atoms’ of information (e.g. last name of your client). Information is a collection of data that has distinct meaning (e.g. annual sales in specific area broken down by a client).

Knowledge is information that has value.  In other words, knowledge is information that allows your employee to create additional value – financial and functional – compared to what he or she can and will do in the absence of this knowledge. Thus, knowledge is information that adds value to decisions and actions in your company.

Then we need to properly define what a corporate knowledge base is.

Your corporate knowledge base is a system of internal and external structured databases and various repositories of unstructured documents that together contain all data, information and knowledge that you need to achieve the fundamental objective of your corporate knowledge management system.

‘Structured’ databases are usually relational databases, and ‘unstructured’ documents are unstructured in the relational sense (relational model is by far the most common database model). These documents have different formats – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, etc. and in terms of these formats, they are structured.

Therefore, there are two ways to obtain the necessary knowledge from your CKB. Either get it directly – from unstructured documents that contain the desired knowledge or to generate (‘extract’ or ‘mine’) it from structured information and data. The proverbial ‘big data’ concept refers to the process of mining data from large amounts of raw data.

To make it possible, you must make sure that (1) all of your data, information and knowledge in CKB is accessible and (2) that you have at your disposal all data mining tools (both hardware and software) that you might need to do this job.

To provide access to timely knowledge at all times, you will have to implement a highly efficient process of gathering, structuring and making available for processing and usage all required data, information and knowledge on a necessary periodic and – when required – real-time basis.

Obviously, you will need a comprehensive, uniform, natural, intuitive and easy-to-use interface (‘front-end’) into your CKB which will allow your employees to access the necessary knowledge according to the all-important ‘need-to-know’ basis (which must be properly implemented and managed). This is the job of a specialized software, such as Comprehensive Business Analysis Workbench (CBAW), for example.

To maximize your CKB performance, you will need to employ a highly competent knowledge base manager and personnel. Who will use the optimal follow an optimal methodology and a highly efficient corporate process for managing the CKB.

To do their job properly, these professionals will need a comprehensive, well-structured, accurate and up-to-date description of your CKB. Including, obviously, the comprehensive, but lean KPI system.

No less obviously, your CKB must be superior to those of its competitors, because in our ‘information era’ and ‘knowledge economy’ superior CKB is often a decisive competitive advantage.