What is Knowledge Management?
Knowledge Management is the process whereby an enterprise gathers, organizes, shares, and analyses its' internal knowledge in terms of resources, documents, and people skills. It incorporates the distribution, access and retrieval of unstructured information between interdependent individuals or among members of a workgroup.Key steps involve identifying a group of people who have a need to share knowledge, developing technological support that enables knowledge sharing, and creating a process for transferring and disseminating knowledge.
Knowledge Management Software (KMS) enables the Knowledge Management process by storing and managing unstructured information in a variety of electronic formats as well as assisting with knowledge capture, categorization, deployment, inquiry, discovery and communication.
The key benefits of Knowledge Management Software are:
- Control large quantities of unstructured information more effectively
- Reduce overheads in maintaining information provision
- Improve levels of collaboration
- Eliminate duplicated effort and increase productivity levels
- Make informed decisions faster
- Make information more widely accessible
- Automatically identify information trends and themes
- Eliminate knowledge gaps
- Optimize an organizations' information flow
- React to information changes
- Delivers instant visibility of information assets