The 9 steps to implement a knowledge management process

What is knowledge management? 

How can we define knowledge management? And what is the process behind it? 

For starters, knowledge management is about how knowledge is created, shared, used, and managed within an organization. The goal is to maximize an organization’s productivity by letting employees exchange success stories and best practices. 

One of the greatest benefits of successful knowledge management is that it can improve efficiency and productivity while cultivating innovative thinking and collaboration among employees. But how does knowledge management enhance the decision-making process? By ensuring that critical knowledge is shared and easily accessible, employees can make more informed decisions.  

This can push employees’ performance to higher levels by cutting down on the repetition of mistakes, which ultimately helps reduce training costs. It also minimizes the halting impact of knowledge loss when employees move on from your business. 

Why is Knowledge Management Important? 

Your organization’s best practices and resources are valuable knowledge assets. These lend the organization an edge over competitors. The amount of data organizations see on a day-to-day basis continues to grow in tremendous numbers by the day. Having a knowledge management system can help navigate this data better and leverage it to improve your organization’s well-being. 

A successful process can improve efficiency and productivity while cultivating the space for innovative thinking and collaboration among employees. This can push their performance to greater levels. It also minimizes the halting impact of knowledge loss when subject-matter experts move on from your business. 

The 9 most important knowledge management process steps 

1. Research

The amount of data in organizations grows daily. Knowledge management can help you better navigate this data and leverage it to improve your organization’s well-being. 

The first step towards establishing an effective process is identifying the knowledge that needs to be captured. Determine where and how you lose data and information within your organization. Understand where the most indispensable information lies and where you can gather information about the business’s best practices. 

Your efforts during this step will ripple across the rest of the steps, so it’s essential to spend as much time and attention to detail as possible here. 

2. Brace your organization for change

It’s impossible to successfully implement a knowledge management process if stakeholders and employees are not on board. Ensure they are ready to participate and believe in the benefits it has for the organization and its employees. You may have to jump some hurdles to get your stakeholders there. Try to overcome barriers by pointing out the benefits of knowledge management. 

Recruit employees who are willing to set an example and are good at encouraging their colleagues to share their knowledge. When they do, reward them, so everyone in your organization sees that it’s fun and engaging to participate in knowledge sharing. And most importantly, that there is something in it for them. 

3. Define knowledge management objectives

It’s important to know where and how you lose knowledge within your organization, and what information or practical knowledge employees need to execute their tasks. Think about what the ideal situation for your organization would be. Based on that, define and document both short- and long-term objectives. These help you address your organization’s challenges and solve them. 

Specifically, short-term objectives enable you to check in and validate whether your process is getting you where you want to go. With long-term objectives, you can create and communicate the big picture within your organization. Both help you to get to the next step: outlining the process. 

4. Outline your knowledge management process and strategy

Your objectives and a clear knowledge management process flow help ensure effective knowledge sharing. Along with that, it’s important to outline your knowledge management process and strategy. These two things help you to make necessary improvements and aid you in getting where you want to go. 

Also, a solid process and strategy are crucial for getting funding from stakeholders within your company and for making sure that all stakeholders who will be involved are on board and kept up to date.  

The success of sharing knowledge depends on them, too. Your process should include knowledge management best practices like capturing, validating, and sharing knowledge. 

5. Pick the right knowledge management tool

Tools, systems, and platforms facilitate the process of knowledge management. It is critical to choose the right one for your company. Roughly put, there are closed and open knowledge-sharing tools.  

Closed tools are great for creating and sharing files, but they aren’t ideal if you want your employees to capture and share their knowledge. Open tools let employees capture and share knowledge that is easily accessible anytime. 

Our authoring tool enables Employee-generated Learning, a collaborative approach to sharing knowledge. It empowers employees to partake in knowledge sharing. Apart from this, Employee-generated Learning has proven to be a powerful approach as it is rapidly scalable.  

It draws data from the most significant source possible: your employees. Quality can be maintained efficiently. It taps into real-life knowledge and expertise within your organization rather than the perspective of third-party vendors. 

6. Capture relevant and meaningful knowledge

Suppose you pick Employee-generated Learning as an approach and have chosen a tool that employees can easily use. In that case, they can start capturing and sharing their knowledge.  

The next step is to determine how you will manage to capture and maintain the knowledge you have deemed necessary. Your system should organize information efficiently, using knowledge bases for easy access. 

7. Determine how you’ll distribute the knowledge

While it’s essential to identify the necessary knowledge and have a systematic method to achieve that, a poorly planned system for disseminating the knowledge can make this process futile. Reflect on who stands to benefit from the knowledge the most. From there, you can ensure quick and effective access to organizational knowledge. 

Danone’s success with knowledge sharing 

Danone, a global food production company with over 100,000 employees, needed a scalable way to meet diverse learning needs. Frédéric Hebert, Head of Digital Learning, recognized that relying on external vendors and a small L&D team was too slow and costly.  

To solve this, Danone embraced a knowledge-sharing culture by enabling employees to create and share their own learning content. After implementing Easygenerator, Danone onboarded over 1,000 content creators in 30+ countries, allowing teams to independently produce and maintain training materials while reducing costs and improving efficiency. 

8. Measure the performance of knowledge sharing 

There is only one way of knowing whether your efforts are paying off: collecting qualitative and quantitative data. These give you balanced insights into what is working and what isn’t. Examples of qualitative and quantitative data are the number of courses made, the number of courses completed, the number of new users, how often courses are shared, NPS, and outcomes of surveys.  

Based on your collected data, you can take the necessary steps to improve compliance, performance, quality, and value gaps and thus improve the effectiveness of your knowledge management. 

9. Measure the performance of knowledge sharing

Knowledge management is an ongoing process that requires consistent reviews, revisions, and evaluations to keep it at the optimal level. The knowledge you capture can also inform the policies and procedures you structure for your organization.  

Moreover, it will foster a culture where employees contribute to collective knowledge. A good example here would be to allow time or, better yet, establish it as the company’s policy to schedule this in a working week regularly. 

Ultimately, each organization will have a slightly different process depending on its unique goals and needs. That said, taking these nine steps can help you form a strong framework for knowledge management and keep an eye out for important tools and best practices. 

Read our full guide about knowledge sharing. 

Knowledge management process examples 

To help you visualize how you can implement knowledge management in your organization, here are some framework examples to consider: 

Learning Management Systems 

A Learning Management System (LMS) allows organizations to upload, store, and manage content. Many Learning & Development managers rely on LMS to host and distribute training courses to employees.  

There are also e-learning authoring tools with LMS-lite capabilities – like Easygenerator. These are tools that specialize in content creation but offer LMS capabilities, allowing you to manage your content directly on the tool, share it with your learners, and track their progress. Easygenerator is an example of a tool like this. 

Project management platforms 

Project management is an important skill for many roles, but tracking progress can be a challenge without the right tools. Tools like Monday.com, Asana, and Trello specialize in enabling teams to collaborate on projects. These tools typically allow you to add tasks, see what your team members are working on, monitor each other’s progress, and even add comments along the way. 

Online community forums 

Not all knowledge management processes take place within a specialized tool. You can also build online communities that invite members to share their success stories, exchange best practices, and discover tips. 

Share and manage your knowledge using Easygenerator 

Easygenerator is an all-in-one e-learning solution designed for subject-matter experts. Its user-friendly interface allows anyone to create and share engaging learning content. No instructional design experience is needed.  

With Employee-generated Learning (EGL), employees can create training for each other, accelerating knowledge sharing and reducing costs. Easygenerator also offers LMS-lite capabilities to create, host, and track courses with data-driven insights. Start your 14-day free trial today. No credit card is required.