By Evgeniya Fedoseeva, the founder and CEO of GenerationKM

Few people would contend that the world is changing faster and faster. With tech, business, and our jobs transforming at an unprecedented rate, it seems truer than ever that a business’s intellectual assets and data are the most valuable thing it has.

These days, we share more information, faster, further and in more varied ways. Our knowledge bases grow more quickly, just as they have to, and we disseminate that knowledge differently across new realities.

Given the rapid development in tech domains, it is easy to see how this gives way to a prevalent misconception in the C Suite that Knowledge Management (KM) is tech. Many business leaders understand that good KM brings a lot of value to businesses, but they make the mistake of thinking that KM is just technology: a piece of software, an intranet or an upgraded IT system.

The reality is that the implementation of knowledge management programs takes more than just bringing a new piece of technology into a business and letting it sit there for the sake of sitting. KM implementation also includes change and people’s motivation, various generations of employees and types of learning, KM processes and innovation, and communities and networks. All are to be assessed and changed in alignment with organisational goals.

These major mistakes businesses all too frequently make demonstrate the five reasons why KM is a business discipline requiring expertise and planning, not just a new piece of tech.

1. You can’t standardise KM in the same way you can’t standardise innovation.

Standardised KM solutions don’t work. Full stop. Every company and every industry sector has its own context, priorities and knowledge flows. This means that any change to the way knowledge is shared through teams, or how it is stored or accessed, must be tailored to them. Otherwise, it just won’t be relevant and won’t be used.

Be it a hyped software solution which you read about in a magazine while travelling, or a set of KM standards, one size fits all won’t cut it. Partly because of how deeply contextual these issues are, but also because of the nature of knowledge itself. Knowledge incorporates both the real and the ephemeral: the data sets on your computer drives and the insight about how to ‘get stuff done’ within your own company culture. It can spread across various generations of employees consolidating the tech-savvy brains of Gen Z and the deep subject matter expertise of Baby Boomers. Standardisation will not work because the generational formula and needs of each organisation are different.

In practice, a standardised approach can lead to the application of irrelevant or obsolete KM approaches, often disconnected from the context of a modern organisation and modern reality.

For instance, a KM framework taken from the 1980s book and applied to a modern organisation with XR and AI solutions in place will be irrelevant. Though key KM terms might still exist and be used, the overall value might not fit the purpose of an organisation.

KM in its nature should be geared towards future-proofing a business. Finding new solutions to safeguard the business and its knowledge base in difficult trading conditions takes focused thinking and relearning. KM should be approached as innovation. Innovation is unstandardisable. And because as a business you must react and pivot in response to external factors beyond your control, it’s not just a case of forward planning. Your ability to continue to adapt and customise your KM strategy is a metric of its success.

2. KM is holistic and exists across organisations horizontally

Implementing KM components in isolation is like trying to bake each ingredient of a cake individually. A piecemeal approach won’t get you results, and upgrading different KM elements at different times will lead to confusion, team-to-team disunity and duplication of work.

Picture a new knowledge management system which is structured in a standard out-of-the-box way without custom organisational language, structure and operational processes. Imagine employees who are not trained and don’t know how to use and why they need to use a new KM system. The easiest way out for people on an individual level is to use their laptops to store knowledge without collaborating with colleagues. In such scenarios, especially in a globally dispersed organisation with multiple cultures and languages, teams will inevitably duplicate each other’s work and lose productivity and time.

Instead, knowledge management has to be an ecosystem of components which work collaboratively. Implementation takes a coherent plan. So you’re changing a knowledge retrieval system or search. How does that affect pre-existing processes? How do you get everybody trained and on board? What are the key datasets in an organisation and where do they feed? What will the knock-on effects be?

Picture a leader who thinks the corporate intranet is one thing he/she needs and this is ‘knowledge management’. The leader traditionally assigns an IT department to build an intranet. The intranet is there as a shell and people don’t use it. The IT team has done their work perfectly according to the IT skillset, however, KM is not IT. KM flows, taxonomy, UX and UI, user workshops and content management mechanisms should be essential parts of any intranet. Integrated elements and data feeds relevant to this or that industry sector, collaboration hubs and etc. This is a frequently observed situation of why IT teams should not be building an intranet system on their own and should collaborate with KM SMEs. An intranet is only one small puzzle of the KM strategy.

KM, like anything, is most effective when it has a direct reporting line to C-Suite. But ideally, KM should partner with the whole business, including both front-end and back-end functions. This includes onboarding practices, people, talent and learning, finance, service delivery, IT, operations, legal, data, R&D, and strategy. Only then can a KM expert ensure that all knowledge-generating engines are included in the KM strategy.

3. KM must be connected to business strategy and change with it

A disconnect from the overall business strategy is the main problem that can arise when KM is not supported within an organisation. It’s surprising how often KM solutions are pasted over the cracks between old IT systems and half-innovated processes. Sometimes the lag between a project being green-lit and actually implemented, means that the priorities are no longer aligned. For instance, you’ll get KM investment in a company’s call centre database despite broader efforts to shift customer support over to live chat.

It should go without saying, that yet is the most common mistake to support generic KM goals or standards without aligning those priorities to your actual business strategy where it can deliver value.

Take, for instance, an organisation where KM strategy is in place and the company goes for direction A. In the middle of the process, leadership decides that geographic expansion and the exploration of new industry sectors are the new strategic goals. In such a scenario, KM strategy should immediately reflect the change and re-design KM flows and engines to deliver the right information and data to teams. This might also require external data acquisition and other KM initiatives meaning the previous KM goals might not be relevant any longer. Adaptation and the ability to move are key success factors for a successful KM programme.

KM strategy should always support the business strategy and change the moment the business direction changes.

4. KM requires a dedicated expert

It’s clear that someone needs to take responsibility for KM in an organisation. Someone needs to be accountable, to answer questions, and to adapt KM planning as required. Often, a few different internal enthusiastic groups will try to set up KM functions, but because of the way KM intersects with different business disciplines, implementation requires a dedicated KM expert.

Knowledge Management is a multi-dimensional area, and a successful KM expert should have a variety of competencies. They need to be knowledgeable about the KM discipline, and its processes, models, and technology landscapes. They will ideally have hands-on experience with KM tools. They will also want to be aware of new approaches for content management and new channels for knowledge dissemination. As well as this subject matter expertise, a successful KM expert needs the capacity to really drive change in an organisation. This takes an understanding of corporate innovation, and a good grasp of adoption tactics and change management. As enterprise technology evolves, so do the KM skills needed to create the organisational KM engines of the future.

Too often, when people bring in well-intentioned initiatives, you see the wrong KM competencies at the wrong place at the wrong time. KM is a separate discipline with its own strategy and KPIs. It requires a holistic transformation of business processes by applying KM-specific methods and approaches.

5. KM must be visible across organisations and requires a change in habits

KM requires a change in human behaviours and habits across the entire organisation. For this to happen, the KM function has to be visible. KM has to be involved. KM has to talk to people, of different seniorities, ages, and parts of the business. If someone comes in and drops a piece of KM software and leaves, or if, as in too many organisations, the KM function is hidden away in a dusty corner, no real KM transformation can ever take place.

That KM expert should really be directly involved in leadership conversations, with KM experts working closely with subject matter experts to deeply understand their business functions.

Take, for instance, the legal sector, which is content-heavy in its nature. KM practitioners will have to get directly involved to understand the way lawyers work, the way they process content, and the way they share knowledge in a confidential way. KM experts are likely to be integrated into teams with lawyers and shadow them to identify KM gaps and improve these with the help of new tech and KM processes. AI solutions are often widely utilised in such a context to save time on manual tasks. But it will also require change as the lawyers adopt new ways of doing things. Though hard at the beginning, the change will improve future productivity.

The challenge of then actually changing those habitual behaviours, and making sure that no one in the organisation is left behind is a challenge for the KM expert. The lack of KM visibility at the business front end is an industry-wide problem because even the most expensive KM software on the market can’t take on this human role.

Final Thoughts

As businesses embrace digital ways of working and generate more and more data, KM is growing ever more intimately connected with technology, digital workplace solutions, and innovation.

But while KM might lead the implementation of collaborative and immersive technologies, a KM expert is specifically interested in how to ensure these technologies actually contribute to organisational productivity and innovation in the context of the organisational strategy and its industry sector.

A good KM programme is more than just tech. It is a firm-wide process guiding the interaction between teams and their tech, the organisational culture, adaptation and adoption, transformation, progressive thinking, learning and change.

As tech advances and businesses become more intelligent and more connected, this strategic function will only grow more important, and it is critical for businesses to prepare for the future, empowered by the next generation of knowledge management approaches.