A robust knowledge management strategy is required to make the remote workplace relevant.
For many members of the workplace, the sudden shift to distributed home offices is a new challenge – but not for others. At some companies, it was a privilege or a perk, only reserved for employees with a long tenure with the company, a degree of responsibility or even just an understanding manager.
However, we’re in a new reality now – and one that has extended that privilege to large portions of the workplace.
So what’s stopped these employers in the past? How do they overcome challenges quickly to meet the new mandate for a remote workforce? Here are the characteristics of connected and relevant remote workplaces:
- Employees have a centralized and trusted go-to location for information for all employees.
- Key information resources for all employees are identified.
- Dynamic and personalized navigation helps employees find information effectively and efficiently.
- Intelligent, job-specific recommendations enhance productivity.
- Analytics and data need to drive continuous improvement.
How to Build a Knowledge Management Strategy to Make the Remote Workplace Relevant
The key to creating a strategy that will evolve with these major changes is to create a strategy and invest in a system that is agile, foundational and data-driven.
Agile
Given how quickly the enterprise is evolving, your strategy needs to be a trampoline, not a hardwood floor. Too often, new knowledge managers focus on “data cleanup” and migration, and then enforce their new system. But there is no time for that. Employees need real-time answers from relevant information and up-to-date knowledge. Your intranet and knowledge management strategy needs to grow and evolve with your workforce. To start, here are some questions to answer:
- Do you know what the most common queries are on your intranet and knowledge base portals?
- How easily are you able to tune and adjust results? Can you boost results? How “connected” is the knowledge management or intranet team with the users of the system? Do they have a process for collecting and managing feedback from users?
- If they need to add a new connector or functionality, such as video files, how easily are you able to do that?
Foundational
While other groups focus on adding more applications, it is the knowledge management strategy that will ensure that the organization’s most valuable resource: knowledge. During this critical time, ensuring every organization has access to it is more important than ever.
- Does your current intranet connect the entire ecosystem of record? Are there channels that are left out?
- Are you confident in the roadmap of the system? Do the future plans the vendor has map to what your company needs?
- Does it scale as your business grows? If your company and its knowledge tripled in size over the next year, would the IT and administrative support costs triple as well?
Data-driven
It’s not enough to provide a great tool and expect teams to run with it; consistent and vigilant monitoring can close the loop on communications from users. A year from now, no one wants to do a debrief on what went wrong and find out that a series of small changes could have saved millions of dollars. Questions to answer:
- How quickly can you identify content gaps?
- How does what you are measuring in the system map to your desired business outcomes?
- How time- and labor-intensive would it be to follow a monthly reporting schedule doing a deep dive into the data?
Dig Deeper
Here at Coveo, we’ve worked with quite a few Knowledge Management teams to put intelligent search and intranets in place that address the questions above and allow organizations to deliver relevant experiences to their employees.
To discover how AI changed the game for Adobe and how you can make it work for your organization, watch How Adobe is Unifying the Digital Workplace with AI-Powered Search & Knowledge.