The Field of Knowledge Management
As government agencies grow in size and workload capacity, it becomes more important to track ideas and information within the workplace. Working with disorganized and unattainable information impedes work flow, causes hesitancy, and precipitates the loss of ideas. The key solution for combatting workplace disarray is an effective knowledge management strategy—the discipline of creating, organizing, documenting, structuring, and teaching accessible information. While implementing organizational strategies may not be a priority for every agency, it is imperative to ensure work processes run efficiently. Agencies save time, money, and resources by investing in knowledge management.
Workplace Problems & Management Solutions
Several issues arise for agencies without proper knowledge management that can result in miscommunication, poor workflow management, and inaccessibility across teams. The two most prevalent issues are the absence of planning and inadequate training. Fortunately, there are solutions that can improve efficiency, workplace progress and team organization.
The first barrier to workplace progress is the lack of planning and notetaking. Without proper notetaking during meetings, important information is not captured accurately. This information is then exchanged between multiple parties and stakeholders where it may be passed along incorrectly. Sharing inaccurate information wastes time and effort. Instead, meeting organizers should create detailed, relevant notes and make them immediately accessible for all involved parties. By distributing meeting notes while the topic is still clear in everyone’s memory, organizers can reduce misinterpretation from secondhand information and bring clarity to the topic.
The second barrier to workplace progress is inefficient team training. Oftentimes, teams have unspoken norms and internal standards that are not formally passed on to new employees. New team members cannot always pick up on these norms, especially while they are adjusting to a new environment. Prepared training materials help new employees onboard and adapt more quickly to a team environment. With a standardized training process, new hires will effectively learn team stratagem with an equivalent level of comprehension.
Improving Cybersecurity in Software Development using Knowledge Management
Effective knowledge management encourages teams to record and actively monitor risks to avoid jeopardizing goals or projects. Software development teams have a variety of standards to follow. Knowledge management best practices will document team standards and testing protocols to ensure code is written consistently, efficiently, and securely. By implementing effective knowledge management strategies, agencies can achieve compliance by ensuring software meets legal and cybersecurity standards.
Knowledge management is vital to accomplishing software development and cybersecurity goals. This includes enforcing security parameters, ensuring that software is legally compliant, and generating high level conversations and planned processes. For example, if high level conversations and security training are enforced throughout an agency, the chance of an unsuspecting employee breaching security by engaging with spam is diminished.
A Successful Communication Process
Knowledge management strategies are useful in various agencies and disciplines, such as government processes, workplace strategies, job tooling, or question and answer forums. Utilizing knowledge management assists employees by organizing resources into a single, available location and ensuring that information and resources are secure, accessible, and easy to understand. While knowledge management workflows vary between companies, a few core steps should guide how managers approach the process.
First, managers should determine what problems exist due to a lack of thorough communication. When diagnosing the issue one should ask the following questions: Is there information that is inaccessible? Is there information that’s only passed by word of mouth that should be written down? Is there information that is not articulated clearly?
Second, managers should guide their team to standardize the process of capturing and consolidating information for future reference. This information can manifest itself in the form of training guides or manuscripts. When consolidating information, meeting organizers should consider what information is most relevant to capture and incorporate into organizational strategies. Then, agencies should ensure that all information is kept in a central location to be accessed and shared by all relevant parties.
Third, managers must continually reevaluate and optimize current knowledge management strategies to ensure that problems are effectively solved. If issues persist, agencies must identify the related hurdles and revise their strategy.
Making the Right Decision for Your Agency
By implementing knowledge management processes, agencies can save time, money, and resources. Through recorded information, monitoring workplace processes, and accessible notes, knowledge management methods improve communication and team building.
Atlassian Secure Knowledge Management
Atlassian helps government agencies improve their ITIS, ITSM and service desk processes with knowledge management solutions. Atlassian can help improve your agency’s knowledge management security by hosting an open and connected platform directly tied to your work, serving as a centralized, organized and searchable knowledge hub, and delivering enterprise-grade security for knowledge management. Learn more about secure knowledge management with Atlassian or schedule a demo with an Atlassian expert for live product training!
