What to Look for in Knowledge Management Software

Originally posted 29-Aug-24

In my experience, knowledge managers are interested in KM platforms that enable critical business activities, rather than software that just offers generic features and functions.

In this post I will describe ideal KM software that enables people to capture, curate, connect, collaborate, create, and communicate effectively. In doing so, I added a sixth “C” — communicate — to the five that I wrote about in my book, The Five Cs of KM.

At its core, knowledge management software should support the five core activities of KM: sharing, innovating, reusing, collaborating, and learning:

Source: Knowledge Nuggets:100 KM Infographics

Building on this core, here are details on how a KM system should support each of the six Cs.

Capture

Knowledge capture includes collecting documents, presentations, spreadsheets, records, processes, software source code, images, audio, video, and other files that can be used for innovation, reuse, and learning. To support knowledge capture, a KM tool should enable:

1. Contributing content to and retrieving it from knowledge repositories, knowledge bases, and structured lists. This should be easy to do via user-friendly interfaces.
2. Integrating content from multiple internal and external sources. This should be done seamlessly and transparently.
3. Populating and updating individual skills profiles to enable expertise location. This should include the capability to extract relevant information from HR databases, external sources, and knowledge sharing tools such as threaded discussions.

Curate

Knowledge curation is taking existing information and making it more useful, including better organizing it, making it more findable, and making it easier to use. To curate is to collect, select, assemble, and present information or multimedia content for other people to use. To support knowledge curation, a KM system should enable:

1. Creating and editing content collections and FAQs, providing consolidated views of content, and delivering customized content via portals. This is for knowledge managers.
2. Managing the full content lifecycle. This is for content managers.
3. Modifying threaded discussions by adding and editing tags and merging, splitting, renaming, and removing threads. This is for community managers.

Connect

Connection is the essence of knowledge management. There are three types of connection that are important. These are people-to-people, people-to-content, and content-to-content. To support all three types, KM software should enable:

1. People to People: Communities of Practice and Enterprise Social Networks.
2. People to Content: Enterprise Search and Federated Search.
3. Content to Content: Enterprise Taxonomy, standard metadata application, and integration with other internal and external systems.

Collaborate

Collaboration is interacting with peers and colleagues to exchange ideas, share experiences, work together on projects, and solve problems. To support collaboration, a KM platform should enable:

1. Team Spaces: Secure workspaces where business units and project teams can collaborate on their efforts. They allow teams to share documents, libraries, and schedules; conduct meetings, surveys, and polls; and store meeting minutes, discussions, reports, and plans.
2. Threaded Discussions: Tools for carrying on conversations among members on a specific subject. They offer online and email posts and replies, searchable archives, and discussions grouped by threads to show the complete history on each topic.
3. Wikis: Sites that allow users to easily add, remove, edit, and change most available content. They are effective for collaborative writing, self-service page creation, and shared maintenance of information. A wiki page can be edited by anyone, thus making it easy to collaborate on writing a document, creating a website, or collecting information on a topic.

Create

Knowledge creation includes inventing and innovating new concepts, approaches, methods, techniques, products, services, and ideas that can be used for the benefit of people and organizations. To support knowledge creation, KM technology should enable:

1. Innovation Management: A vehicle for submitting, tracking, and processing suggestions and ideas, with the goal of acting on the best ones. This can be via specialized systems for collecting and managing ideas or using an Enterprise Social Network with special tagging.
2. Standard Methodologies: Repeatable techniques and approaches that can be used to solve a problem or accomplish a desired result in a proven way. A process for practitioners who discover improved ways of doing things to convert their insights into new methodologies.
3. Content Creation: A simple way to create and contribute white papers, presentations, podcasts, videos, and training modules. Gamification can be effective in motivating the creation of new content.

Communicate

Communicating is conveying information and news updates to other people. This can be done using writing, images, audio, or video. To support communication, KM applications should enable:

1. Discovery: Publishing top-down vetted information and providing browsable directories.
2. Syndication and Subscription: Providing content such that it can be subscribed to using an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed reader, integrated into a website as a subset of that site, or received as an email notification or application alert.
3. Blogs: Posting articles or entries (as in a journal) displayed in reverse chronological order. Blog posts combine text, images, and links to other blogs and websites. They typically provide archives in calendar form, local search, syndication feeds, reader comment posting, trackback links from other blogs, blogroll links to other recommended blogs, and categories of posts tagged for retrieval by topic.