Documentation includes user guides, manuals, and help files that allow users to read about what is expected of them, the people, processes, and tools available to them, and how to use all of these to share, innovate, reuse, collaborate, and learn.

Complete and effective documentation supports training, communications, and user assistance. It is a good way to demonstrate knowledge sharing and reuse, and allows users to learn about all elements of a KM program.

The types of documentation to provide include big picture documents, user’s guides, administrator’s guides, policies and procedures, and knowledge sharing documents. …

KM Training includes classroom courses, self-paced courses, and recorded webinars that allow users to learn what is expected of them; the people, processes, and tools available to them; and how to use all of these in order to share, innovate, reuse, collaborate, and learn.

For details on developing a KM training plan, see KM Initiatives Require a Training Strategy.

Here are examples of plans for three specific courses.

Example 1: KM Program Overview

1. Content: introduction — a high-level overview of the KM initiative and its components
2. Delivery Method: webinar (live, and recorded for playback)
3. Schedule: recurring dates — third Tuesday of every month
4. Duration: 90…

Communities are groups of people who share an interest, a specialty, a role, a concern, a set of problems, or a passion for a specific topic.

Community members deepen their understanding by interacting on an ongoing basis, asking and answering questions, sharing their knowledge, reusing good ideas, and solving problems for one another.

Communities should be part of any KM program. Connecting people is fundamental to getting knowledge flowing, and communities are an important way of doing so.

Here are five keys for a successful community of practice:

1. A compelling topic: The members and potential members must be passionate about…

This is the 67th article in the Profiles in Knowledge series featuring thought leaders in knowledge management. Heather Hedden designs, creates, and edits taxonomies, thesauri, metadata, and ontologies for indexing and tagging content to support content retrieval, search, and findability. She trains others to create taxonomies and wrote the book The Accidental Taxonomist. I have met Helen at KMWorld.

Background

Social networks are collections of people who are acquainted or connected as friends, business contacts, or colleagues and communicate, collaborate, or help one another as needed.

People establish relationships with other people for friendship, social activities, business development, and career advancement. Another important reason is to share knowledge and learn from each other in order to work more effectively. …

Originally posted 08-Apr-21

Surveys are essential at the start of a KM initiative to ensure that the program meets the needs of the organization. You should also develop processes for soliciting ongoing suggestions, providing feedback, and submitting change requests.

You can use one-time or periodic user surveys and employee satisfaction surveys to determine user preferences, needs, and challenges and to determine how employees view a KM program and its components. Specialized surveys for specific roles such as Community Managers can also be crafted and distributed. …

Knowledge managers are people who spend all or a significant portion of their time leading knowledge management (KM) initiatives, sharing knowledge, and supporting others in sharing their knowledge.

You will need to have at least one knowledge manager to lead the KM initiative. Knowledge management is everyone’s responsibility, not just the work of knowledge managers. But knowledge managers are needed to raise awareness, align knowledge actions with business priorities, promote a knowledge sharing culture, engage senior leadership, manage the infrastructure, and support all knowledge workers.

Knowledge managers know how to use KM tools, how to ask others for help, who…

This is the first in a series of 50 posts promised in Select and Implement People, Process, and Technology KM Components. Culture and values are the way things are done in an organization, and what things are considered to be important and taboo.

The KM 10 Commitments require that your organization embody a culture with core values conducive to knowledge sharing. Identifying the current culture and values of your organization will help you take advantage of those elements conducive to knowledge sharing and address those which are not, with the help of the senior executive’s commitments.

Understanding how people interact…