Creating An Enterprise-Wide Knowledge Map

A government-based research and development organization was highly siloed, with limited collaboration across teams. This led to challenges in capturing and reporting strategic data, leveraging technology and people across silos, and optimizing budgets and staffing to effectively manage public funds.

To address organizational challenges, leadership tasked the knowledge management team to work with APQC to collect information from headquarters and its seven directorates. They focused on understanding core functions, dependencies, and redundancies, creating knowledge maps aligned with systems and repositories. This resulted in a comprehensive enterprise-wide map reflecting core business processes and knowledge needs. The map identified critical gaps and opportunities to enhance knowledge flow and optimize the use of resources across the organization.

• Knowledge Mapping
• Knowledge Management
• Knowledge Flow Analysis

The organization gained clarity on its business processes and supporting data, enabling them to develop, update, and automate processes and IT systems, and identify where to connect existing repositories to improve knowledge flow and facilitate effective reuse. Enterprise mapping helped the KM team prioritize projects and communicate their importance to stakeholders. This approach streamlined project communication, ensured all stakeholders understood their roles, and improved organizational effectiveness.

• Conducting a process-based knowledge audit and using knowledge maps help to effectively break down barriers between silos.
• Use aggregate knowledge maps to identify gaps, simplify processes, eliminate redundancies, and enhance collaboration.
• Use the enterprise view as a reference model for strategic planning and budgeting to guide evolution and performance improvements.