With this base draft you could start your own personal or business knowledge management system. At the beginning it is less importantly that the solution fulfills all requirements, but it must be able to grow with your needs. There probably will not be the ideal solution, like in many areas of life. An advantage of small selfknitted solutions is, that they only cause extremely few costs, but still could have a considerable effect.

The best way to start, is to split your business into units: Sales, Accounting, Production, Purchase, etc. as you like. It may be a good idea to keep in mind, that you have some specific workflows to follow. So you may take logical units from these workflows.

Workplace descriptions are a beginning to describe your business workflow and to collect the knowledge in your company. The workplace descriptions should be tuned to each other, e.g., the accounting receives information from the purchase department, and so on. Specific knowledge of your employees could also flow into the workplace descriptions and will be at disposal for other employees. Also other sources inside or outside your business could be included in your knowledge management system.

A good start is a Internet- or Intranet-based System, where you could save your data. A good knowledge management lives from the regular revision of the entries. By adjusting your business knowledge and workflows you increase the speed of your organisational procedures and you will be able to save a lot time for yourself and your customers as well. If you just store everything in a file folder and forget about it, then you should think on throwing the whole case of knowledge management into your trash basket, because information which is kept just to be there and which will not be used by anyone is just trash.

If you also use your knowledge management system to archive specialist knowledge, please keep in mind, that all knowledge should have be in conjunction with the aim of your business. If you don’t keep an eye on what is stored in your system, you might have a lot information which is not every useful for you. So review regularly and think twice about entries which have no or little interest for your business.

In case you change procedures in your workflows or entries in your knowledge management system, it might be a good idea to keep a short text about how the entry has changed over time. This is just to give yourself the possibility to review the process of changes and to know where you have come from and what has been changed. But keep this kind of documentation very short.

On your own computer you my start with something like to following:
Make a directory called "Knowledge Management". Under this directory make as much subdirectories as you have subjects, e.i. IT, Accounting, Business Management, Legal Information, etc. All data you receive in electronic form should be assigned to the suitablest subject subdirectory. Review the data you collected periodically and delete what you think is not needed anymore.

Similarly you can do this with files and folders. Make a least one derictoy or folder for temporary items, that are all items you collect which you could not directly sort into one category. Review this temporary items more often, and delete what is not needed and sort out what you could do into other directories.

We wish you a lot success with the conversion of this idea.




As a subscriber of our service, we provide you with a internet-based tool for knowledge management, which we call “Company Handbook”. To view the demo of the Company Handbook you have to open a free test account. More details about our subscriptions are available here.

Business-Management

- (2325 Reads)