What are the benefits of a knowledge management system?
To give just one example, British Petroleum’s KM created $260 million of added value because it built an environment where employees could share information efficiently. With the digital era already rapidly disrupting industries, what could a knowledge management system mean for your company?
1. Increased productivity or reduced salary expenditure
“If Hewlett Packard knew what Hewlett Packard knows, we would be 3 times more productive” — Former HP CEO, Lew Platt.
Knowledge management circumvents the searchability issue and gives your business a foundation to automate repetitive tasks. It leverages what you learn from every interaction between employees or with customers to create frictionless processes with automation and AI.
2. Accelerated customer inquiry response times
Online shopping is here to stay and crafting the perfect self-service customer experience cannot be understated. According to a Salesforce survey, 78% of millennials will take their business elsewhere after just one poor customer service experience. A negative experience can be anything from a delayed response from your team, a frustrating chatbot, an unfriendly customer journey or more. All of which are easily solved by KMS.
3. Reduced brain drain
10,000 baby boomers retire in the US every day. Exactly how much information and experience do you think gets retired with them? While you’re at it, how much information do you think is lost every time a tenured employee resigns?
Inevitably, each facet the individual employee impacted will need to be replaced. Brain drain is a far greater cost to those without a knowledge management system and has even been crippling to many. A KMS system allows you to retain much of their practical nous and allows the team to defer to a knowledge bank when required. You may never quite replace the individual but you can store the information they have built up.
4. Enhanced onboarding procedures
Using a KMS, the required training material and instruction can be readily available and stored in standard operating procedures. KMS optimizes the time of the recruit and manager whilst removing the potential for oversights.
You see, each new employee that goes through your training has a different experience depending on the availability of team members to train them in. This is leading to omissions and differences in the preparedness of new recruits. KMS systemises the process.
The data routinely delivered by stretched management is captured and automatically reproduced for incoming recruits. Nothing gets lost and management time remains purely for questions and cultural integration. In times of major growth, a KMS driven onboarding process allows for smooth and agile scalability.
5. Cut information recreation costs
BAE Systems now employs over 85,000 people in 40 different countries to provide security and protection services. They are a model of intelligence but before their explosive growth, they struggled with profitability.
Unfortunately, these instances of effort duplication are rife without a KMS. Plants, branches, departments, teams and right down to individual employees are left with a communication barrier that adds extra work and limits all tacit and explicit knowledge sharing.
6. Reducing mistake frequency and empower decision making
Knowledge management means that history doesn’t have to repeat itself when it comes to mistakes. So many organisations maintain an unfortunate structure where their teams don’t learn from each other. Sales might routinely hear the tales of woe from different customers about the inefficiency of the chatbot. However, this isn’t filtering through to your marketing or web development team.
The mistakes are allowed to continue when knowledge isn’t readily shared and accessible to all. KM systems help businesses to get faster at identifying and solving issues, and creating user manuals, how-to guides and seamless customer experiences. It leverages previously learned information to shorten learning curves and inform decisions.
We operate in a knowledge economy that is unrelenting and ruthless. As more companies follow Gartner’s advice of automating everything possible to save costs and augment learning, a bedrock of information is more and more essential. Without leveraging what you learn, many businesses will be left behind by the incessant appetite for growth of others.
Knowledge management stands as the key to unlocking the innumerable benefits to employee and knowledge optimization, artificial intelligence and automation.
Need to review your knowledge management system and workflows?
Originally published at https://knowledgebird.com on April 7, 2021.
