Knowledge Management

You can’t under estimate the value of experience and “gut-feel”, but ultimately every business decision is based upon “knowledge”. Knowledge management is all about ensuring that the relevant people in an organisation have the right knowledge at the right time to make informed decisions. (It is also about ensuring that people who do not need to know are not bombarded with irrelevant information). Even small organisations can struggle to capture, share, organise and present information effectively. 

 

Over time organisations can find that they fall into the trap of creating overly bureaucratic systems often with cumbersome paperwork, i.e. the fear of making poor decisions leads to excessive formality and bureaucratic waste to try and reduce bad-decision risk.

 

I would argue that it is better to be sure that decision makers have the right information at their finger-tips, coupled with the training to analyse the data and the freedom to make decisions. This makes for an agile, lean business – but it requires good systems and a culture of trust.

 

When making business decisions it is important that information is presented in the most appropriate format for the business role digesting that data.  It is also important not to under estimate the value of a good user interface that includes graphs, summary tables and intuitive navigation to get to the detail behind the headlines.

 

Over time businesses collect a lot of information, often in disparate systems. Data Mining is the processes of asking questions and getting answers from the disjointed data.

Joining disparate systems together without affecting the day-to-day running of the business may not be straight forward. Experience with different database types, software languages and the skill to get to grips with legacy systems is needed. Sometimes it is better to port data from one system to another so that querying at future dates is performed accurately and cost effectively. Obviously the best solution for a particular client is going to depend upon their own circumstance.

 

Having managed to export data from a legacy or disparate system and associated it with other data, it may still not be in the right format for an employee to read and make use of. So once the data is integrated and accessible by queries the next phase is to manipulate the data into the most appropriate format for a user to understand. Different user types will want different report formats. Consider creating dashboards summarising data and statistics (for management), coupled with detailed tabular / graphical reports for the users who are going to process the information further.

 

It has been said that the core of efficient business is effective communication - Great leadership can only work if the right information is known by the right individuals at the right time; otherwise it is impossible to make informed business decisions.

 

Data can be shared in a controlled way, as part of a process where data is formally exchanged, and accepted. Or it may exchanged in an “effortless” way were the data becomes available for access as and when it is needed.

 

A barrier to sharing data can be seemingly incompatible systems – specialist software can be developed to overcome this.

 

Another barrier to sharing data is the data-protection-act. However it is often the case that by stripping out personal details the data can be shared and integrated – providing the statistics needed, without the risk of accidently divulging personal details to third parties.

 

We have experience in developing software to solve knowledge management problems enabling organisations to share information between divisions, groups, individuals and existing software packages.

 

Our database development and specialist Import / Export experience enables us to manipulate data so that seemingly incompatible systems can exchange data, so staff can see new information via the software that they are already familiar with.

 

Strategically we can help our customers work through the definition of their needs and understand the consequences of what they ask for so that our solutions solve their problems whilst giving the desired level of control and privacy protection over data items.

 

Contact Us to find out more.