{"id":3396,"date":"2022-11-22T07:30:06","date_gmt":"2022-11-22T15:30:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.golinks.com\/blog\/?p=3396"},"modified":"2024-10-17T00:06:06","modified_gmt":"2024-10-17T07:06:06","slug":"five-key-challenges-in-knowledge-management-and-how-to-solve-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.golinks.com\/blog\/five-key-challenges-in-knowledge-management-and-how-to-solve-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Five Key Challenges in Knowledge Management (and how to solve them)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

If your company is like most others, it likely has a few informal ways of documenting, sharing, and tracking internal knowledge. For instance, senior leaders may hold regular company-wide meetings or send monthly email updates; Human Resources (HR) might have frequently asked questions stored in a company wiki; and your sales team might share quarterly results in a slide deck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, even with these knowledge management systems in place, most employees still struggle to find the information they need to do their jobs each day. Research shows that the average employee spends over three hours a day<\/a> searching for existing company information, and large enterprises lose an estimated $70 million a year<\/a> thanks to undocumented knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clearly, something is going wrong in companies\u2019 attempts to store and manage data. Below, we\u2019ll cover the five key challenges in knowledge management \u2014 as well as a tested way to solve those same challenges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Challenge 1: Lengthy knowledge management processes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Have you ever been asked to use a process at work that seems\u2026 just a bit<\/em> over-engineered? For instance, a boss might ask you to input the same information in an Excel sheet, a project management tool, and a shared document, or to replicate files across multiple different systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sure, the solution solves a problem \u2014 but it also creates an entirely new one, since the whole process takes you three times as long as it should.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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One of the reasons knowledge management is so important is that it helps employees save time at work. But if it takes employees just as much time to organize resources as it does for them to track down poorly stored information, then you\u2019re really just replacing one problem with another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Challenge 2: Cross-departmental knowledge silos<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Thanks to their unique responsibilities, different teams tend to prefer different SaaS tools. For instance, your customer support team might prefer to document frequently asked questions in Trello, while developers might live in Jira.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Often, this preference towards using different tools and processes can make knowledge sharing across teams difficult. While teams may manage their own knowledge well, they may only share updates with other teams at bi-weekly syncs or monthly meetings \u2014 deepening the silos that already exist across departments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Challenge 3: Company turnover causing knowledge loss<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In 2022, the number of voluntary departures at companies increased by an average of 37%<\/a>. Unfortunately, that\u2019s a number that\u2019s only expected to rise in 2023<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This increase in turnover makes knowledge management more important than ever for companies, since every time an employee quits, they take valuable company knowledge with them. Sometimes, a company won\u2019t even realize that only one person knows how to fix a piece of code until that same individual leaves the company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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If employees don\u2019t have tried-and-true ways to share the knowledge they\u2019ve gained in their role, then that know-how is lost when they leave your organization. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Challenge 4: Employees unmotivated to change<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For many organizations, the problem isn\u2019t the lack<\/em> of a knowledge management strategy \u2014 it\u2019s the fact that employees don\u2019t actually use the knowledge management tools that are in place. In fact, Gartner estimates that a full 25% of the software tools<\/a> that organizations purchase go underutilized by employees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When a tool is too difficult to adopt, unfortunately, many employees simply won\u2019t adopt the product. If a new tool isn\u2019t intuitive, many employees will simply keep sharing information in the ways they\u2019re familiar (and comfortable) with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Challenge 5: Knowledge management tools that don\u2019t integrate<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Most companies use more than one knowledge management tool, since unique types of information need to be stored in unique ways. Customer information, for instance, may be stored in a customer relationship management (CRM) tool, while documents are stored in a content management system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, the problem with using multiple knowledge management systems is that it can be difficult for employees to constantly shift gears between tech tools \u2014 and many tools don\u2019t integrate smoothly with one another. When your teams\u2019 software choices don\u2019t play nice with one another, it\u2019s easy for information to become siloed within different systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Streamline knowledge management with GoLinks<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For many companies, these knowledge management challenges will only become more pronounced as they scale. Fortunately, there\u2019s a tool that can be used to solve these common challenges: GoLinks<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GoLinks lets team members transform long URLs into short, intuitive, and easy-to-remember links. For instance, if a marketing team member wants to check the timeline for the rollout of a certain feature, they can simply go to \u201cgo\/roadmap\u201d in their browser, rather than having to search through a tool they don\u2019t understand to find a particular project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s how it can help you overcome common knowledge-sharing challenges:<\/p>\n\n\n\n