Knowledge Management can increase a company's productivity by 25%, so even the CFO should pay attention to it.
Knowledge management is a set of activities, processes and tools to classify information and make it available to the organisation or a team of people. It aims to improve the professional performance and the overall performance of the team, optimising the results of the organisation or of a specific project by converting individual or collective knowledge and experiences into a usable asset of the organisation.
The ultimate vision of an organisation that manages its knowledge is to become smarter, in the sense that it can integrate and correlate the expertise of its individual members, learn from experiences and projects as an organisation, and leverage that knowledge for future exploitation.
When an organisation is able to easily access, share and update business knowledge, it can be more productive and profitable. The ability to access the right knowledge at the right time, through a robust knowledge management system, enables accurate decision-making and stimulates collaboration and innovation.
According to a McKinsey study, productivity gains in information seeking can be as high as 35%, contributing to a 25% improvement in overall organisational productivity. This study focuses on the consumer goods, commercial banking and financial services, advanced manufacturing and professional services sectors.
The implementation of a knowledge management system is also a remedy for Business Alzheimer's, a business disease that prevents the company from growing on its own accumulated experiences and becoming increasingly "wiser".
As the organisation grows larger, with increasingly disconnected teams, it becomes increasingly important to "know what we know", or even "know what we knew". And especially if part of that growth is inorganic, acquiring and integrating other organisations with other cultures and management systems.
The organisation, whatever its size, needs a corporate approach to knowledge management. Moreover, implementing a homogeneous knowledge management system can greatly facilitate successful inorganic growth.
The corporate CFO's blood pressure may rise when he or she realises that one of the group's factories is trying to develop a solution that was already being addressed elsewhere in the corporation - or had been tried and failed. But it would be even more expensive not to realise it... ever.
Knowledge Management is concerned with knowing what we know in the organisation and how to exploit it - what is called internal knowledge - but it also encompasses how to capture and organise externally generated information, and how to make it available to the team. In other words, taking advantage of what others know. For this reason, many companies are already implementing Competitive Intelligence and Technology Watch solutions such as Antara Mussol, with the aim of managing knowledge both external and internal to the organization.
Let's take into account that an average employee of an industrial or service company spends 19% of their time searching for and gathering information, to which we can add 14% of time dedicated to communicating and collaborating internally on this information (Source: International Data Corp and McKinsey Global Institute). This is 33% of their time that we can optimise, and significantly increase individual and team productivity as a whole.
This is a huge potential for improvement that we can tap into for a comparatively small investment. How many actions are aimed at improving margins, purchase price, financial costs... which have a much smaller potential impact, although it is perhaps much easier to measure.
Antara Mussol is the software application that allows you to not only monitor what is happening in your company's competitive landscape but also provides mechanisms for indexing internal company information.
To monitor your competitive environment, Antara Mussol offers a powerful and original method to express the company's ever-changing objectives and use them to filter information from the market, competitors, legislation, and a multitude of other environmental perspectives.
Antara Mussol also has solutions for filtering the information generated internally in the organisation. All you need to do is define those internal sites where the shared documents are hosted and give Antara Mussol permissions to monitor them. With no need for programming or advanced administration knowledge, in just a few seconds you can activate the standard connectors for any of the collaborative platforms widely used in industry intranets.
Anyone who dumps shared information - without needing to be an Antara Mussol user - will be feeding the internal intelligence service, and the application will alert different people based on the content shared and the responsibility of each person. Assigning responsibilities by topics and by levels of involvement allows efficient information flows to be designed and not overload the team with uninteresting information.
Therefore, combining a good collaboration and intranet system on the market, together with Antara Mussol, can solve a large part of a company's knowledge management needs.
In subsequent steps, we can address the integration of other systems also relevant to knowledge management, such as:
Credits: Photo by Niklas Ohlrogge on Unsplash
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The opinions of the authors reflect their own views and not those of the company.