Three Key Areas of Your Business That Need Proper Knowledge Management

Featured article by Karthik Krishnan, Independent Technology Author

A business is only as strong as the workforce it employs. Whether that workforce consists of one or one thousand, the employees are in charge of executing the vision set out by the company’s leadership. Ideally, the most crucial pieces of information that are possessed by one member of the company should be possessed by all, once management makes the decision that the information is useful enough to be made widely known without doing some sort of collateral damage.

Just about every area of a business, large or small, needs some sort of system in place for knowledge management. If one link in the chain is weaker than the others, the imbalance caused could do short and long-term damage to a company. Yet there are some areas where the practice of knowledge management should really come into play, especially in this age of Big Data analytics where even the smallest piece of information can be transformed into a crucial strategic advantage.

All of your business practices, from the kind of phone system you use to the way that your website is structured to drive sales, should benefit from this sharing of information. Here are the three departments where business owners should make sure that knowledge management is taking place.

The Sales Staff

Salesmen and women are responsible for pushing the message about your business and the products it sells or the services it offers into the world. If they don’t get the benefit of knowledge-sharing from the very top of the business on down, they could be spreading misguided, dated or even flat-out false information about the business to others. And, since the salespeople are generally meeting with the people who are going to make decisions about whether or not to do business with you, they need to have the most current information at their disposal.

Human Resources

This is an often overlooked area when it comes to knowledge management, but it can be one that makes a big difference in how your business is conducted. After all, these generally are the people responsible for hiring new people to your firm. If they don’t have access to data and relevant trends within the workforce community, they are likely going to staff your business with a group of people who are either subpar or just not suited for the jobs that they need to do. And that will hamper the overall potential of your business.

The Executive Suite

You would think, at first glance, that all executives would be privy to the most crucial information regarding the business. But many executives are people who were extremely competitive, and those competitive people often don’t like to share information with others who might use it to their advantage, even if those people are co-workers. So some system must be in place to ensure the easy flow of information to and from all of these important cogs in the machine.

Information management may sound like something that should happen naturally. But stressing it and ensuring that it is occurring smoothly is a surefire way to protect your business from any major letdowns.

Karthik Krishnan

Tech addict, the explorer, living with the internet. The passion for technology has never failed to fascinate in every stage of his life. He maintains his own blog Tripontech. Now, he regularly contributes to some of the popular magazines, sharing his experience with the world. His work has appeared in Huffingtonpost and Socialnomics.net.