So, you "manage knowledge", huh?

Whenever I tell people I'm a "Knowledge Manager", the common response is an eyebrow raise, followed by, "umm... what is that?"

I usually take the opportunity to share this Dilbert comic strip and say it's exactly how I got my job.

Okay, obviously the comic strip is a joke. But the job title could easily come off as a joke. How in the world do you "manage knowledge"?

Knowledge Management (KM) is defined as the process of identifying, organizing, storing and disseminating information within an organization (shout out to IBM for this definition). To put it simply, KM is about managing your organization's, or personal, intellectual capital.

Types of Knowledge

I manage the intellectual capital for organizations. Let's break down some of these words further.

• Management = Involves planning, administration, tracking, and maintenance.
• Intellect = Deals with intelligence, insight, and reasoning, which when combined, make up knowledge.
• Capital = Something you own, possess, and wield (e.g., an asset).

Quite literally, Knowledge Managers oversee and maintain organizational intelligence. But, what type of "intelligence"?

Let's break down this intellectual capital thing into two main types of knowledge that organizations own.

1. Tacit knowledge - The type of knowledge a person possesses that isn't easily articulated or codified, like on-the-job knowledge, previous experience, and expert insight.
2. Explicit knowledge - The type of knowledge that can be easily documented to support an organization's operational efficiency, like diagrams of internal systems, standard operating procedures (SOP), and business processes.

Knowledge Assets to Manage

It's at this point where people ask, "Where do I sign up?" Off the bat, the concept of managing these types of knowledge may seem like an obvious undertaking. We all access information daily to perform our jobs, whether from a system or our brains. But the million dollar question is, "how are these types of knowledge managed?"

Think about all the ways you access information at your company daily.

• Email messages
• Chat messages
• Meeting recordings
• Reports
• Meeting minutes
• Support cases
• Standard operating procedure (SOP)
• Online courses
• Contracts
• Your crazy personal notes
• Lions and tigers and bears!

There is often a mountain of reference material needed to execute daily duties. If we're not accessing all those items in one place, we may be working in silos. And silos SUCK in the workplace, especially when it comes to accessing information. They create bottlenecks for teams, cause a ton of rework, and other nightmarish situations. I could tell a million stories about how working in silos hindered productivity and even employee relations, but I digress.

Effective KM solves the silo problem by taking that crazy web of data and reference material, and pulling it into a single access point that becomes a source of truth for users. This way, you can find anything you need across a range of sources with one simple search query, rather than having to go to seven different systems to gather the info you need to do your best work.

Help Centers

If you want to see knowledge management in action, check out an online help center. It's likely your bank, phone service, or insurance company has one. The term "help center" is really just a branded title for a knowledge base - a central space where people (whether employees or customers) access information on-demand through its own search engine. Knowledge bases are self-service tools that come in all shapes and sizes. Some help thousands of customers find answers to common questions through a search bar or chat bot. Others support front-line staff with an easy way to search for the latest instructions for on-the-job tasks.

To be clear, the help center concept isn't the only way to manifest knowledge management, but it's certainly the most common and easiest way to visualize the process of identifying, storing, organizing, and sharing information.

Where I come in

I manage the process of bringing organizational intelligence from multiple sources into one place, and making everything searchable through a central knowledge base. It's no easy feat, because things can get really technical.

Yes, there is software out there that enables you to build a knowledge base in no time, with no code and out-of-box features packaged into a single platform (shout out to ready-made tools like Document360, Helpjuice, and Bit.ai). The core component of these tools is the good ol' knowledge base article - a short or medium-length digital post for answering FAQs, handling on-the-job scenarios, or introducing new subjects. While articles are crucial to the KM process, not every organization's use case is that simple.

Other use cases involve custom-built solutions, like deploying Search-as-a-Service tools such as Elastic Search, Algolia, or IBM Watson. In other words, you build the portal and connect the search bar to the various sources your organization uses to manage files, online coursework, articles, reports, and more. My position becomes especially fun when infusing AI chat bots into the mix, ones that can answer user questions in conversational language and connect to your data sources to deliver the right info to a user, from the right source, in seconds.

Wearing many hats

You often wear many hats in this role, too!

If you're tasked with building an information architecture, your role involves technical development, project management, change management, strategic planning, and more.

If you're tasked with maintaining a system that's already built, your role is inevitably more reactive, since KM is a reactive discipline. Sure, you can be proactive about launching new features and scaling systems to meet the evolving demands of your organization. But you can't know what needs to evolve without understanding the needs and wants of your user base. You perform analyses to measure the efficacy of your search and navigation functions by answering questions like, "What do users search for?", "Where do they spend most of their time?", "Which searches produce no results?", etc. You keep track of such metrics, create feedback loops, and adjust accordingly.

And what good is all this fancy technology without solid content? You're responsible for managing the development of content, including technical documentation or general copy. You also establish a knowledge-centered service (KCS) culture where contribution to a central knowledge hub becomes "business as usual" for all users. It's a strategy used to put knowledge sharing on auto-pilot, while setting the right parameters to maintain the integrity of the organization's intelligence.

Overall, it's a fascinating position to undertake in today's world, because you blend several disciplines, including psychology, ontology, business, and technology. Especially technology.

Software is becoming so advanced and business-centric, organizations are reaping the results of KM solutions that increase operational efficiency, reduce turnover, and boost customer satisfaction. All by offering users an advanced solution to the age-old problem of finding the right information when they need to act on it most.

So yeah, that's what I do.

Not so much of a joke now, eh? If you're interested in the wonderful world knowledge management, I'll get into specific processes, technologies, and tactics used to accomplish the KM mission in other articles.

But for now...

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• LinkedIn: Diego Miguel Torres
• Twitter: @justaskdiego