How to build an effective knowledge management strategy
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How to build an effective knowledge management strategy
Will Kelly
18 July 2024
11 min read
Will Kelly
18 July 2024
11 min read
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What is a knowledge management strategy?
5 benefits of a knowledge management strategy
How to successfully develop a knowledge management strategy
Knowledge management strategy: five best practices
How to use Confluence for knowledge sharing
Developing a knowledge management strategy is integral to businesses that want to maintain leadership in their marketplace.
Corporate knowledge is hard to gain but easy to lose, as layoffs, employee resignations, and mergers and acquisitions don't account for institutional memory.
It's time for organisations across industries to include knowledge management (KM) in their work management practices and develop an effective knowledge management system. Here’s how:
It's time for organisations across industries to include knowledge management (KM) in their work management practices and develop an effective knowledge management system. Here’s how:
What is a knowledge management strategy?
A knowledge management strategy is an approach that systematically captures, organises, and shares information in an organisation. Its main goal is to improve efficiency, collaboration, and knowledge sharing.
5 benefits of a knowledge management strategy
Here are five benefits of a knowledge management strategy:
1. Improved decision making
Project teams and stakeholders make better-informed decisions with access to vetted, comprehensive, and relevant information, which a knowledge management strategy provides. Eliminating the need to track down documents in team members’ inboxes and other secret stashes ensures that your people work from the most up-to-date information when making decisions.
2. Enhanced collaboration
Knowledge management means building frameworks and platforms that centralise knowledge. Such an approach supports enhanced communication and collaboration among team members and even cross-functional teams, saving them from having to hunt down information.
3. Increased efficiency
When a knowledge management strategy can deliver increased efficiency via a platform and framework, it saves employees time searching for information and improves overall efficiency. A knowledge management platform should work for your users, not vice versa, so building for efficiency means the following:
- Implementing and maintaining platform-optimised search
- Developing simple and well-documented workflows that don’t make extra work for users
- Encouraging users to share success stories about the platform’s efficiency with their colleagues
4. Knowledge retention
A knowledge management strategy can help stem the bleeding of institutional knowledge leaving your organisation. It doesn’t just happen when your star programmer leaves, either. Think of the technical writer who gets laid off, but no effort is made to retrieve the work from their accounts because, at the time, nobody thought about it.
5. Innovation and competitive advantage
By leveraging shared knowledge and insights, organisations can foster innovation and maintain a competitive edge in their industry. The shared space of a knowledge management platform encourages the exchange of ideas, especially when employees gain a better view of their organisation’s work.
How to successfully develop a knowledge management strategy
Developing a knowledge management strategy is a cross-functional team effort, especially in IT organisations. Work with these people to identify needs and set measurable goals for the initiative. Benefits include improved decision-making, enhanced collaboration, increased efficiency, knowledge retention, and fostering innovation and competitive advantage.
1. Audit your current knowledge management efforts
Audit your current collaboration and knowledge management efforts. Start by assessing the current state of your documents and databases. Some organisations also identify employee expertise during strategy development.
2. Develop a knowledge management framework
Develop a knowledge management framework - in plain English - that documents how your organisation will capture knowledge. Common framework elements include:
- Methods for capturing tacit and explicit knowledge, such as recorded interviews
- Methods for capturing explicit knowledge, such as centralised repositories and databases in Confluence
- Requirements for selecting platforms for storing your institutional knowledge, such as SaaS-based collaboration tools and cloud storage
- Processes and tools for sharing knowledge across the organisation, such as internal wikis and knowledge-sharing sessions
- Documentation about how to integrate knowledge management into workflows such as your DevOps processes and related business decision making
3. Implement knowledge management tools
Choose knowledge management tools that align with your organisational needs, such as collaboration tools and knowledge bases that integrate seamlessly with your organisation’s other systems and workflows. Take the time to build pilots and proof of concept knowledge management sites for one of your teams to trial on a small project.
4. Integrate knowledge management into your DevOps and project workflows
Integrate knowledge management into your project workflows to streamline processes. For example, by integrating Confluence with Jenkins or GitLab, your CI process can automatically update documentation when new code is committed or deployed. The goal is to avoid creating extra work for teams.
Knowledge management strategy: five best practices
1. Align knowledge management with business goals
Ensure the knowledge management strategy aligns with your organisation’s goals and objectives. It’s the best way to demonstrate the value of knowledge management to your stakeholders and secure their support.
You should review and update your knowledge management strategy to support your organisation’s evolving goals. When a strategy drifts beyond organisational goals, it becomes even easier for employees to disregard your knowledge management initiative as just a pet project that doesn’t add value to their work.
You should review and update your knowledge management strategy to support your organisation’s evolving goals. When a strategy drifts beyond organisational goals, it becomes even easier for employees to disregard your knowledge management initiative as just a pet project that doesn’t add value to their work.
2. Implement common user-friendly tools
While there are specialised knowledge management tools, these tools are often used by industries such as life sciences and manufacturing, which require strict document management to maintain compliance. Your organisation might use Confluence for documentation and Slack for real-time knowledge-sharing, ensuring these platforms are easy to navigate and search. More importantly, these are tools that your users already know, and they already run your workflows through them.
3. Use AI to automate knowledge discovery
When users experience robust search when searching a knowledge management repository that returns items that meet their needs, it can win you champions.
Knowledge management is a candidate for AI-based automation to improve the discovery of relevant knowledge in increasingly larger datasets. If implemented correctly, generative AI can also improve the quality of content.
AI is gradually joining the premium tiers of collaboration platforms. For example, Atlassian AI is available for Confluence Cloud Premium and Enterprise Plans. It enables you to draft content, summarise pages, and create automation rules that perform various tasks, including page maintenance. Notion is making inroads with Notion AI and Notion Q&A as premium customer offerings.
Knowledge management is a candidate for AI-based automation to improve the discovery of relevant knowledge in increasingly larger datasets. If implemented correctly, generative AI can also improve the quality of content.
AI is gradually joining the premium tiers of collaboration platforms. For example, Atlassian AI is available for Confluence Cloud Premium and Enterprise Plans. It enables you to draft content, summarise pages, and create automation rules that perform various tasks, including page maintenance. Notion is making inroads with Notion AI and Notion Q&A as premium customer offerings.
4. Make knowledge management a team responsibility
While a case can be made for centraling knowledge management as a corporate function, there also needs to be a person responsible at the team or department level who’s familiar with the content and the work. It could be as easy as assigning your technical writer or business analyst to spearhead knowledge management tasks for team projects.
5. Ensure continuous improvement
Establish metrics to measure your knowledge management strategy effectiveness, such as user engagement levels, the frequency of knowledge contributions, and the impact on business outcomes. Use these metrics to identify areas for improvement. Conduct regular reviews and solicit feedback from users to refine the strategy.
Quarterly knowledge base usage and content reviews can help ensure that your knowledge management initiative provides value. Use this review time to review your analytics and speak with your stakeholders and users for feedback on your efforts.
Quarterly knowledge base usage and content reviews can help ensure that your knowledge management initiative provides value. Use this review time to review your analytics and speak with your stakeholders and users for feedback on your efforts.
How to use Confluence for knowledge sharing
Atlassian Confluence can become a powerful knowledge-sharing tool if you approach it with a strategy and continuous management.
As a start, set standards for organising content with Spaces and pages as part of your strategy. Confluence Spaces are repositories for related content, such as departments, teams, or projects.
Your teams then create pages for various topics, ensuring information is accessible, organised logically, and easy for users to find. Invest the time upfront to organise pages in your spaces by creating a Confluence knowledge base. Confluence includes the following features:
- Publishing by default enables you to publish content when ready
- Built-in page history to see what’s changed
- Automated busywork that sets automated reminders (a premium feature)
You can also collaborate using online Confluence whiteboards for capturing ideas, blogs, and databases.
Confluence offers project documentation templates for various types and tools for creating and publishing them, ensuring consistency across your organisation.
Taking advantage of Confluence Search requires some basic Confluence administration skills. Using labels (tags) to categorise pages can further enhance the search experience, making it easier for team members to locate the needed information. Establishing labeling standards as part of your knowledge management strategy is essential, even if your organisation already has a more extensive set of label standards.
Integrating Confluence with Jira, Trello, and Slack fosters knowledge sharing across your organisation by linking documentation directly to projects and workflows, and enhancing communication around shared content.
Your teams can also use page and inline comments in Confluence to give feedback on content. Holding a dialogue via comments ensures that multiple collaborators, not to mention your stakeholders, can review comments.
All Confluence spaces need an owner who can handle space admin work, answer questions, create templates, and introduce new features.
Knowledge management over some projects, such as specific client work or corporate strategy, may require access security, which you can use Confluence permissions to secure sensitive information to the project team and the stakeholders that need access. You can set permissions to view, edit, and comment on pages.
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Check out our Confluence apps to see how we can help you with your workload - free trials are available now.
Written by
Will Kelly
Content Writer
Will Kelly is a freelance writer. After his earlier career as a technical writer, he’s passionate about easing collaboration pain points for teams, whether technology, process, or culture. He has written about collaboration for IT industry publications.
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