What roles and expertise are needed for a knowledge management program?
Originally published June 23, 2019
Q: I’m currently in internal communications at my company (a large health care company with about 90,000 employees). Our team has been driving KM efforts for several years and we are finally in a position where we can ask for a dedicated team for managing knowledge and our digital workplace.
Do you have any existing resources you could share or specific advice for the kinds of roles that make a KM program successful outside of the knowledge managers/specialists themselves? (User experience, data analyst, business analyst, people who specialize in training content owners, etc.)
A: Roles include having responsibility for one or more of the 50 KM components or the 100 KM specialties I have defined. Here are some specific examples:
- Knowledge Managers and KM Leaders
- Knowledge Brokers, KM User Assistants, and Knowledge Help Desk Agents
- Community Managers
- Content Creators, Curators, and Content Managers
- Intranet Site Editors and Web Developers
- Taxonomists
- Information Architects
- User Experience Designers
- KM Project Managers
- KM Technology Specialists, e.g., Microsoft SharePoint, Atlassian Confluence
KM programs can use these types of expertise:
- Change management
- Collaboration and communities of practice
- Learning and training
- Gamification and digital badging
- Social Network Analysis
- Expertise location
- Communications
- Knowledge transfer
- Knowledge-Centered Service
- Content management and document management
- Analytics and visualization
- Project management
- Agile development
- Knowledge audit and knowledge mapping
- Appreciative inquiry and positive deviance
- Storytelling and narrative
- Information architecture
- Design thinking
- Usability, user interface, and user experience
- Enterprise search and findability
- Taxonomy and ontology
- Portals and intranets
- Big data and business intelligence
- Digital workplace and digital experience
- Cognitive computing and artificial intelligence
There are many different roles that participants in a KM program need to play. Some will be providers and some will be consumers of knowledge. Most people will be expected to perform multiple roles. Following is a list of roles.
- leader: defines and communicates the core values of the organization, sets and communicates direction and goals, and inspects and ensures performance
- knowledge manager or assistant: leads and supports the KM program as full-time or part-time jobs
- survey taker, administrator, or creator: provides user input by participating in taking and administering surveys
- networker, connector, or collaborator: connects with other people as part of a social network or community and helps them out as needed
- community member or manager: participates in or leads communities of practice
- student, teacher, or training developer: takes, teaches, or develops training courses
- reader or author: reads or writes user documentation
- methodology user or developer: uses or designs standard methodologies
- inventor or innovator: creates new knowledge
- contributor, content owner, curator, or content user: shares, provides, curates, or reuses knowledge
- reporting consumer or provider: uses or creates metrics reports
- change agent: enables process or culture change to occur
- process user or provider: uses or creates work processes
- inquirer or searcher: asks questions or searches for content
- storyteller: uses narrative to motivate others to take action, build trust, transmit values, get others working together, share knowledge, tame the grapevine, and create and share a vision of the future
- tool user or provider: uses or creates tools and systems
- threaded discussion participant or moderator: participates in or leads threaded discussions
- expertise locator or provider: locates expertise or serves as an expert for others
- taxonomy governor: defines and maintains a standard classification system used for metadata, navigation, and searching
- tagger: applies metadata tags to content so that searches and aggregators will find it
- archiver: archives content so that it is preserved
- blogger: publishes blog entries, links to other blogs, and responds to comments
- wiki author: edits wiki entries or creates wikis to allow cooperative editing
- podcaster or vlogger: records and distributes audio or video broadcasts
- subscriber, syndicator, or publisher: subscribes to news, blogs, wikis, podcasts; syndicates or aggregates any of these; or publishes any of these
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