Analyzing Your Knowledge Management System

The fundamental objective of your corporate knowledge management system (KMS) is stated in a deceptively simple way:

To give every employee of your company fast, easy, comfortable and natural access to all knowledge and tools that they need to make the optimal decisions, coordinate them vertically and horizontally, and execute them in the best possible way in their responsibility areas.

Incidentally, this objective is called a ‘corporate cockpit’ problem and is sort of a ‘Holy Grail’ of information and knowledge management technologies.

Why in the world would you want to achieve this objective? Because to generate the maximum amount of financial and aggregate value (which is the ultimate objective of business management), your employees need to make the best possible decisions and execute them in the best possible way. Coordinating their decisions and actions with other employees – horizontally and vertically.

And to make it possible, they need exactly the right knowledge (comprehensive, accurate, timely, etc.) about your internal and external affairs.

To solve this problem and achieve this objective (and to do it in the most efficient way), you will need (1) a comprehensive corporate knowledge base; (2) data, information and knowledge management tools – hardware and software; (3) highly efficient corporate processes (especially the one for updating and improving your KMS) and (4) competent and experienced IT management and personnel.

Obviously, these components must be tightly integrated into a comprehensive and highly efficient system. And your KMS – into your overall corporate management system

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

You can optimize only what you can manage. You can manage only what you can measure. You can measure only what you can see. Therefore, to maximize the performance of your KMS, you absolutely must have a comprehensive, well-structured and accurate description of your KMS.

Clearly, your KMS system itself must be comprehensive, well-structured and lean (no unnecessary objects). And match your information and knowledge management strategy, of course.