“The pandemic accelerated trends already underway” may be the signature phrase of 2021. As worn out as the sentiment is, it’s hard to get away from. COVID-19 forced people and organizations to shift gears faster than ever before, but it primarily mainstreamed changes that had been gathering force for years.
And in these sudden shifts, knowledge management was no exception. When I think about the biggest KM developments over the past year or two, none are really new. But the events of 2020 drew leaders’ attention to knowledge risks and gaps they had previously ignored while hastening the mass adoption of new technologies to store, curate, transfer, and make sense of enterprise knowledge.
Here are a few KM trends and developments I’m keeping a close eye on. But I also want to know what you think the future holds. Please let us know by taking our 11-question KM Trends Quick Poll.
1. KM is now part of the digital workplace.
According to APQC’s research, the number of employees whose coworker interactions are primarily virtual jumped a whopping 400% in 2020! The shift to remote work caused a stampede toward virtual workplace tools for online meetings, team-based chat, document collaboration, and so on. Hopefully we’ll all have the opportunity to be in-person soon, but web-based collaboration platforms are here to stay.
KM programs must now enable knowledge flow in a work environment dominated by technologies like Teams, Slack, and Zoom. 52% of KM leaders say a long-term or permanent shift to virtual work has significantly changed their KM strategy or priorities in the past year. In some ways, remote and hybrid work make KM’s jobs easier: Knowledge-rich conversations that used to happen off-the-grid now have “digital trails” that can be mined and harvested, and employees are more comfortable turning to apps to access information and expertise. But the digital workplace can also pose a threat to KM. People drowning in team-based collaboration may retreat from cross-functional sharing due to sheer exhaustion, and organizations may forget that some KM objectives have nothing to do with supporting virtual work.
KM leaders should reevaluate their programs to ensure they accommodate a hybrid workforce. This not only applies to KM systems, but also workshops and trainings. Not everyone will return to the office, so now is the time to redesign traditional in-person experiences for a virtual audience. KM should also ensure the knowledge sharing, access, and reuse they want to encourage happens “in the flow” of digital work. If—for example—employees are already using Office 365, KM should either move its communities and repositories to that environment or connect the platforms for seamless access. And as always, KM should continually look for knowledge challenges and opportunities created by remote and hybrid work and align its strategic objectives to those issues.
2. AI is finally happening for KM
People have been telling me that artificial intelligence was poised to take KM by storm for at least five years. Back then the capabilities existed but implementing them required an infusion of time and cash that few could justify. And even when a KM team (often at a large professional services firm) made those investments, it didn’t necessarily score a home run.
But AI is becoming progressively better, cheaper, and easier to integrate into enterprise systems. At the same time, the KM problems that AI is poised to solve are reaching a tipping point. Organizations continue to amass information at alarming rates. Without systems in place to curate and make sense of it all, finding the right nugget—much less drawing the right insights—is like looking for a needle in a haystack. The rapid changes and social distancing requirements of the past 18 months have only acerbated these problems. Two-thirds of KM and IT leaders say concerns about the ability to find enterprise information have increased since the pandemic—and more than a third say they have increased significantly.
The good news is that supply is meeting demand. Organizations are increasingly investing in AI, either for point solutions or as part of broad digital transformation efforts. We are seeing leading KM teams use AI to:
- Recommend metadata for content
- Tag and flag items that need to be reviewed, updated, or archived
- Vastly improve search results
- Proactively recommend knowledge to users without them having to search for it
- Personalize the end user experience based on who people are, what they’re working on, and how they’ve previously interacted with KM systems
For KM teams that previously dismissed AI as out of reach, now is a good time to reassess. But as always, there is a risk of following the shiny object, without a clear business case. APQC recommends you start by scoping out the knowledge problems your stakeholders care about and see if an AI-driven solution might meet those needs. Then investigate what it might cost, how much manpower is needed, and whether you can align partners or advocates to help justify the investment. AI may not make sense for you right now, but if employees are struggling to find and drive value from enterprise knowledge, it’s worth serious consideration.
3. KM results are now business results.
The trend I’m most excited about reflects a broader shift in KM’s strategic positioning. Traditionally, many leaders saw KM as a back-end cost center. When they looked at KM metrics, the questions were: How can I spend the least amount of money, and how can I show cost savings or avoidance equivalent to what I spend? And if the economic outlook necessitated budget cuts, KM was classed as a “nice to have” that could be slashed.
We’re now seeing a gradual evolution of thinking, with leaders recognizing KM as a potential value driver. With the rise of the digital workplace, some realize that KM can affect productivity and satisfaction—and those things matter for the bottom line, even if their impact is hard to measure. But even more importantly, there’s a dawning realization that seamless access to knowledge allows teams to innovate, solve problems, and respond to change more efficiently.
When we study the KPIs for recent and future KM investments, the top objectives are no longer about saving money. They’re about saving time, moving faster, getting there before the competition, and of course, keeping busy employees happy. A lot of these impacts can be directly tied to revenue—and KM’s influence on them can be measured.
Most organizations strive to be data-driven these days, which means standardizing and integrating data streams while improving analytics capabilities. KM can capitalize on this by articulating exactly how the KM strategy will drive value for the business and then sourcing and correlating data to show that impact. As KMers, we know KM makes a difference to the bottom line. We are now better positioned to go out and prove it—and the business is listening.
What do you think the future holds for KM? Let us know by participating in our 11-question KM Trends Quick Poll. Everyone who participates will get a copy of the results later this summer.