Every business has access to an extensive pool of business working knowledge, whether they realise it or not. Whether it’s how they understand their customer needs, their knowledge of the business environment, or the skills and experience of staff. Knowledge management is about knowledge sharing, accessing, and exploiting that knowledge to grow your business.
The knowledge available to all businesses is limitless, but it can be gathered in many ways. Either way, knowledge management is an essential part of any business.
Running a business, you face a tremendous amount of knowledge and information, which is critical to succeeding. Still, it can be difficult to harness and exploit it for growth.
Everyone in business can benefit from access to a library of business knowledge, but how do you create a knowledge sharing strategy?
What is Business Working Knowledge?
Useful and important working knowledge exists in your business. It can be found in your team’s experiences, expertise, day to day operations, designs, processes and procedures which all enable your business to provide your services or products.
To get the most out of your business knowledge, you need to put the right processes in place to share that knowledge effectively.
Selling your goods and services isn’t about coming up with clever new products or devising ingenious new ways of selling them. It’s much more straightforward. Think about the working knowledge you already possess like, files of documents (both digitally, or paper form) ideas for new products or services, research for potential markets and the knowledge and experience of your customers. The challenge is making use of this knowledge in a coherent and productive way.
Sharing Working Knowledge
Creating a how-to guide using employees’ tacit knowledge which has been developed through experiences, skills and ideas is a huge asset that needs to be harnessed. They should pass on their knowledge to others in your business and can improve business efficiency and productivity.
Business working knowledge should be documented in form of business processes, create a business operations manual or checklists for best practices on how you can carry out a task and get the best possible results.
Employees are far more productive because they are able to benefit from colleagues’ knowledge and expertise. Which will enable them to get more work done in less time, because of shared working knowledge and expertise. Employees will also feel more appreciated, as their ideas are listened to.
Knowledge Management
Business Knowledge Management is an essential part of your business growth strategy. To grow your business, you need to gather and apply the right knowledge, and you need to be able to share that knowledge with your team.
Business Knowledge Management (BKM) is a strategic process by which you develop and apply the knowledge in your company to increase the effectiveness of your business operations. It is the practice of developing and maintaining a body of knowledge that is relevant to the needs of your business.
Knowledge management allows your business to tap into the collective wisdom of your organization, and then use that knowledge to make decisions that impact the quality of your products and services. To better understand the benefits it can have on business
Documented working knowledge is essential to help everyone to find the answers to questions they have about the business and its processes.
Working Knowledge sharing offers many benefits to business and here are some examples of knowledge that can be shared. It can include everything from:
- How to create an invoice for the accounting department.
- HR and how to recruit a new memeber of staff.
- How to onboard customers for the sales team.
- Even down to basic like where to buy office supplies.
- Manufacturing facility: Include information on the best materials to create a certain product and this can be shared directly with the workers on the production line. Also identify tools that are requires.
- Health and safety processes to keep everyone safe.
- Conformity
By making the best use of knowledge, businesses are able to improve their product quality and increase their market share.
Knowledge Core to Business
Everyone needs to understand the value of knowledge and knowledge management across the whole business.
There are many ways to manage your working knowledge but technology alone isn’t the answer because making people understand that sharing their knowledge benefits everyone. It is essential that you develop a knowledge strategy and efficient systems for storing and easy retrieval of essential information.
Checkify offers you a way to document business processes and use them at the click of a button and use in the form of checklists. These have key steps documented and guides so essential steps in a process are not be forgotten.
Business Knowledge Sources
Knowledge can come from many sources and in many forms. It can be hard to find, but it’s there if you know where to look.
Customer knowledge – You should know what your customers’ needs and what they think of you, so you can develop mutually beneficial knowledge sharing relationships. By communicating and discussing future requirements of how you might be able to benefit each other and how your services and products can help and meet their needs, you’ll be able to establish a good understanding of their future requirements.
Tacit Knowledge – Your employees are the key to your success. They are knowledgeable are invaluable for setting your company apart from the competition. They know your business better than anyone else, so it’s essential that you know how to tap into their knowledge.
By sharing knowledge, you will be able to create a better working environment and ensure that your business runs as efficiently as possible. For example, you might create business processes that act as a guide to business’ best practices.
FeedBack – It’s important to understand how your employees, customers and suppliers view your business. You should ask employees for their views on how they think you’re performing as they have first-hand knowledge and may see ways to improve. This can be done in a formal or informal way. Customer success teams gather information and identify issues that need to be addressed. Can you implement different business processes?
Market Niche – Find out about new developments within your niche market. How are competitors performing and how do they do things differently from yourselves? How much are they charging and what value are they offering? Are there any new businesses evolving in the market? Have any new and significant products been launched?
Worldwide Business Environment – If you want to be successful, you need to stay informed of the business world. Many external factors can influence how your business operates or open potential new markets to you. Developments and changes in politics, the economy, technology, society, the environment and recently a global pandemic could all affect your business’ development, so you need to keep yourself informed. Consider setting up a team or process to monitor and report on changes in the business world that could influence how you do business.
Professional Bodies – Reports and research papers from research bodies and trade magazines, professional associations and other trade magazines and publications, exhibitions and conferences are great sources of business knowledge. Retaining your competitive edge can be achieved by using scientific and technical research and development to create innovative new products.
Technology to Manage Knowledge
Technology has become a vital part of our daily lives and can be used to help you gain and make the best use of knowledge.
Databases – Databases offers an easy way to access, manage and update data.
Task and Process Management – Checkify is a task and process management system that enables business processes and best practices to be documented and used every time that process happens. This reduces mistakes but most importantly, guarantees that the process is completed in the best possible way every time.
Intranet or extranet – internal network or networks that include customers and suppliers.
Data mining: Process data collected within the business and then sort to determine patterns in data.
Reporting and Analysis: Analysis of your data to make sure you achieving your goals.
Knowledge and processes work hand in hand because both are the basis that businesses run on.