Managing a company’s knowledge assets is crucial to the smooth functioning of daily activities. It prevents blocks in employee tasks, streamlines user onboarding, and reduces customer support tickets. Yet, building a robust knowledge system that consistently delivers accurate, relevant, and easily accessible content across various channels is a challenge. For this reason, companies must take their enterprise knowledge management (EKM) seriously as, on average, workers spend 2.5 hours each day searching for information — that’s 30% of the workday which could be spent advancing on mission-critical tasks.
Whether you’re scaling operations rapidly, looking to retain employee know-how, or wanting to improve the user support experience, enterprise knowledge management is a priority. Read on to discover knowledge types, tools for long-term success, the benefits of a comprehensive system, and the pitfalls to avoid in your company’s enterprise knowledge journey.
What is Enterprise Knowledge Management?
Enterprise knowledge management refers to managing the creation, organization, and reuse of knowledge assets within a company. It leverages advanced tools and methods to ensure information is well-organized and easy for employees and users to find. Effective EKM breaks down informational silos and offers benefits such as heightened productivity, optimized employee onboarding, enhanced customer experience, and improved knowledge retention.
Enterprise knowledge management is closely related to enterprise content management, or ECM. ECM is the processes, strategies, and tools used in managing the lifecycle of business content.
However, while ECM focuses on organizing and controlling content, knowledge management takes it a step further by emphasizing the capture, sharing, and application of knowledge—such as insights, expertise, and best practices—within an organization.
Core Components of Effective Enterprise Knowledge Management
There are three main steps that go into establishing robust enterprise knowledge management.
Content and Documentation Creation
Step one in managing enterprise knowledge is developing and collecting existing knowledge. This includes several types of information such as tacit knowledge (insights gained via experiential learning or firsthand experiences) and explicit knowledge (written information like product manuals, business reports, guides, and studies). Knowledge teams must identify new and ongoing opportunities to gather, document, and update knowledge from various sources.
Documentation Storage and Organization
Once companies create knowledge, they need a storage system like a knowledge base or documentation portal to ensure information is ready and easy for users to find when they need it. A knowledge base or portal is a self-service library that stores information about a business, its products or services, and industry-related subjects. Users can log in to these digital hubs to access the company content they need. Companies may use a range of techniques such as taxonomies to organize the content and facilitate knowledge findability.
Knowledge Sharing and Access
Once knowledge content is centrally available, users should be able to retrieve the information they need, when and where they need it, based on their permissions.
A documentation portal or knowledge base helps internal and external users find and share information smoothly. Empowering them with knowledge and resources maximizes the impact of your EKM system, leading to higher productivity, increased customer engagement, and lower costs.
Technologies Enhancing Enterprise Knowledge Management
There are a handful of technologies and tools that are essential for taking your enterprise knowledge management to the next level.
Knowledge Creation Tools
To create enterprise knowledge documentation, companies must use their authoring tools to concretize vital information. Depending on the team creating the knowledge (i.e. technical writers, product manager, developers, etc.), they will use various solutions to produce this documentation: MS Word, CMS, CCMS, GitHub, Adobe premiere Pro, and other video or voice recording tools.
Enterprise Knowledge Platforms
EKM helps companies optimize their collective knowledge by harnessing tools to create, organize, and find information easily. One crucial tool is an Enterprise Knowledge Platform (EKP) which collects product knowledge in various formats from all sources and combines it into a central knowledge repository. By first unifying content then connecting it to the points of delivery — whether it be a CRM, a website, or AI application like a chatbot — EKPs enable companies to deliver a consistent and context-driven content experience to users on their preferred devices and at any touchpoint. As a result, knowledge is accessible throughout business processes. EKPs are also defined by their built-in compliance, prioritizing content security, traceability, accessibility, and entitlements. This ensures the protection of confidential information throughout the knowledge management and delivery processes, as well as the personalization of the content experience.
Advanced Enterprise Search
Enterprise search is essential for productivity. Two main options can be considered.
Federated search pulls content from various silos across an organization, providing access to information scattered across different systems. While effective in that it enables one single query for multiple sources and repositories, performance can be slow and content security hard to implement and monitor. In contrast, unified search embedded within enterprise knowledge platforms guarantees consistency, enables personalization of search results, and natively ensures content security.
Federated or unified within an EKP, innovative search solutions will also integrate AI applications to provide new, natural search experiences.
Generative AI Applications and Chatbots
Combining enterprise knowledge management with Generative AI (GenAI) applications is an effective way to keep pace with the changing demands of the market and deepen knowledge-sharing opportunities. By implementing an AI-powered chatbot or search experience, users can ask questions in a natural, conversational way and get instant, accurate information in return. This empowers them to seek out the answers to their questions with ChatGPT-like tools customized for your company’s product knowledge.
In parallel, AI helps businesses create new, engaging content experiences. By integrating GenAI applications into touchpoints (i.e. your documentation portal), users can seamlessly generate content summaries, instruction lists, quizzes and more — the sky is the limit! By customizing AI prompts, you can optimize information retrieval and provide an efficient content experience.
Benefits of Implementing Enterprise Knowledge Management
While there are many tools to consider when investing in enterprise knowledge management, these core components will help companies maximize their returns and benefits.
Improve Employee Productivity
Enterprises with teams of at least 1000 knowledge workers report wasting between $2.5 to $3.5 million each year due to employees failing to find information, searching for nonexistent documentation, and spending time recreating knowledge content they can’t find.
This underscores the importance of EKM providing employees with access to accurate, relevant information. When done properly, your teams make quick, effective decisions in their projects, improving productivity. When people find answers to their questions, they can complete missions faster and troubleshoot issues to quickly get back to their core tasks.
Facilitate User Onboarding
Gathering company and product onboarding documents provides benefits to internal and external users alike.
Helping new employees find information has a huge impact. 81% of newcomers report that their companies use at least 6 apps or tools for delivering knowledge content. Furthermore, 42% of new hires agree that key information is too scattered, resulting in inconsistent information results, an inability to identify accurate sources of truth, and delays in starting their jobs. Knowledge management centralizes documentation, empowering new hires to adopt your internal processes and procedures faster. This enables more effective onboarding by helping them access the shared knowledge of their colleagues. EKM fosters autonomy and reduces tedious questions for veteran employees.
For external users and customers, organized onboarding is essential for product adoption. Investing in enterprise knowledge management helps companies gather the relevant training materials, tools, services, and content each user profile needs. Some companies will also invest in customer documentation portals to deliver this content and provide a guided onboarding process. This enables users to become experts in your product at their own pace.
Strengthen Customer Experience
Centralizing all knowledge and providing advanced search features across content applications helps customers find answers autonomously. This ability to solve issues without needing to contact a live support agent is called self-service and customers are big fans. In fact, 95% of businesses are experiencing an uptick in requests for self-service opportunities and 86% of B2B customers prefer digital channels with self-service capabilities. When customers feel empowered to solve their problems with little to no delay, they leave their interactions feeling satisfied and positive.
Improve Knowledge Retention
Continuously creating new knowledge is essential for preventing knowledge loss when team members move on to new jobs. Capturing tacit knowledge is crucial because otherwise, it remains solely in the heads of employees where it cannot serve future team members. The average turnover rate across all industries in 2023 was 13.5% for the US and 16.8% for the UK. Losing this much valuable expertise from experienced team members has severe impacts on the daily functioning of your organization. Investing in EKM ensures that knowledge remains in your company even if employees don’t. As a result, remaining employees perform their jobs better, find answers to their questions faster, and improve their professional development.
Challenges to Navigate in Enterprise Knowledge Management
While EKM brings many benefits, there are also several challenges companies need to navigate to maximize their results.
Knowledge Silos
Reports suggest that an average of 35-50% of enterprise knowledge is not centrally indexed, creating inconsistent and complex knowledge silos. With each new tool companies introduce for users, they create a new touchpoint that needs to be connected to company and product information. This means that each content-consuming application also creates a new information silo, leading to increasing complexity around content findability, traceability, and security. To prevent this, companies need an intermediate solution to collect, unify, and feed enterprise knowledge to each endpoint.
Outdated Content
From business expansion to new product releases, change is inevitable. Amid these shifts, organizations must keep knowledge content up to date, as inaccuracies lead to downtimes and frustrations. However, maintaining content freshness is a challenge.
Many companies are turning to Enterprise Knowledge Platforms, also called Content Delivery Platforms (CDPs), which gather and unify all content in one location in a single click. By integrating with all authoring tools and content applications, updates instantly apply to all content. Without a tool like this, knowledge findability and consistency remain at risk.
Technological Barriers
Another challenge companies face with EKM is technical obstacles. Not only do companies need to choose a solution that unifies content into a central repository, but this tool must also be able to easily integrate with content sources and end points. However, many solutions struggle to offer complete interoperability.
Data Security and Compliance Risks
As companies establish EKM, they will encounter the challenge of securing their confidential information from leaking to unauthorized users. This becomes an even bigger possibility when businesses integrate GenAI applications. To mitigate risks, companies must adopt robust security measures and choose solutions that make it easy to manage user authorizations.
Finding the Right Content Analytics
Enterprise knowledge management is not something to be set up and left alone. Knowledge is ever changing, and companies must track the use and feedback of user interactions with their content to optimize information. Many solutions don’t offer the level of advanced content analytics needed, keeping companies in the dark about how to improve. Look for platforms that analyze trends in content use, search terms, and content findability.
Future Trends Around AI in Enterprise Knowledge Management
Looking ahead to the future, GenAI will continue to become more prominent. Companies will seek to leverage AI technology to optimize and enhance their knowledge management processes. From facilitating tacit knowledge collection to increasing the productivity of knowledge teams and improving user search experiences, leaders will flock to tools that facilitate easy integration of AI in enterprise knowledge management.
Conclusion
Effective enterprise knowledge management is crucial for optimizing employee and user experiences. By harnessing the power of EKM tools like advanced search, Enterprise Knowledge Platforms, Generative AI, and more, companies can facilitate the capture and sharing of knowledge. According to McKinsey, adopting a resourceful knowledge management strategy cuts the time lost searching for information by up to 35% and improves employee productivity by 20-25%.
Discover how Enterprise Knowledge Platforms like Fluid Topics can mitigate challenges and provide the capabilities needed to access the benefits of a robust knowledge system.
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