What is Knowledge Management?

What if a company knew what it knows? The information is there, hidden in reports and e-mails and published on the corporate Web site or even more probable, it is in the minds of the employees.

Knowledge management addresses many of the problems that organisations face today with an abundance of information, and requirements to respond faster and more accurate than the competition. What if we could harness this wealth and improve the transfer of competence between people in the organisation, to and from customers, suppliers and other stakeholders?

How do we define Knowledge Management?

Knowledge management is hard to define simply and precisely. In practice knowledge management often encompasses identifying and mapping intellectual assets within the organisation and sometimes outside. The purpose is to generate new knowledge for competitive advantage making vast amounts of corporate information accessible, sharing of best practices, access to experts and use of technology to enable all of the above. Technologies used encompass groupware, intranets, collaboration software, expert systems, CRM, pure KM systems and more.

It is required that knowledge management is of explicit concern to all business activities, reflected in strategy, policy and practice at all levels of the organisation. A direct connection must be made between the intellectual assets (both recorded and personal know-how) and positive business results.

Examples of benefits of Knowledge Management:

• Reduces cost by making all relevant knowledge available without having to "reinvent the wheel"
• Saves time by providing reusable modules, presentations, key selling arguments etc.
• Increases innovation by providing a wide range of proven methodologies, tips and tricks and competencies
• Grows the individual social network by fostering cross-country and cross-organizational collaboration
• Leverages local innovations on a global scale, providing the same competencies everywhere and anytime
• Increases sales through reusing business opportunities and leveraging solutions across markets and customer types
• Increases the quality of your offerings by exchanging best practices and anticipating key trends.

What Athena Solutions can do for you

We can help you define a strategy as well as help you benchmark against the many solutions out on the market. Managing knowledge can range from simple solutions that help keep track of projects to more advanced collaboration and knowledge sharing systems.

We take an active role in all stages of the strategy process from problem definition to integration, development and training of proposed solution by offering the following services:

• Business Consulting
• Project Management
• System Integration, System Development
• Training

We perform analysis of work processes, identify efficiency gaps, information gaps, and propose enhanced work processes with corresponding technical solutions.
The goal is to institutionalise knowledge management and make it the way we do things around here! Read more about How we work .