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How (and when) to update your KM strategy

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Strategic elements

Although the individual tactics organizations employ in their KM strategies will likely vary according to their mission statements and business priorities, there are certain strategic elements that can bolster the efficacy of any particular strategy. Ensuring that KM endeavors support different access points, systems, and user preferences is a prime consideration for updating KM strategies. “When building a knowledgebase, it doesn’t have to be a separate system or repository,” Nivala advised. “It can certainly just mean that the primary business systems and information management systems the organization uses are capable of being used in ways that accumulate high-quality, curated information.” An assortment of approaches in which data can stay in source systems, yet be centrally accessed via knowledge graphs, data virtualization, certain master data management implementations, and other methods facilitates this advantage. An alternative perspective on this strategic element would be to have “a central repository that would be a source of truth for all this knowledge, but you can get to it by different avenues so that your employees are seeing it from what system they look at and still get back to that source of truth,” Petruzzelli added.

The knowledge curation phase, which frequently takes the form of semantic tags, classifications, and other codifications, will remain indispensable to, and likely become automated for, KM strategies. “In 2024, LLMs [large language models] can semantically tag a document at the most granular level in a way that previously was a dream,” Kamien mentioned. According to Nivala, what AI expressions are less accomplished at, and what will remain central to modern KM strategies, is “adding that relationship like, or have this piece of knowledge which, in itself, doesn’t talk about customer or the organization, but rather what it’s related to. We need to be sure that we record that business context.” Kamien added that he thinks KM is “still in the early days of a shift from document-centricity to data-centricity and, ultimately, to meaning-centricity and reasoning-centricity. Data-centricity means you can harness structured and unstructured data and pull out answers to questions in an unstructured document.”

Moving forward

Emergent technologies, strategic elements, temporal drivers, and vendor relationship implications are critical for updating a KM strategy—as is the over all KM landscape as a whole. When to update your KM strategy is dependent on your individual situation. How to update it has more commonalities as technologies, overall organizational goals, and customer expectations evolve and change. What is not in doubt is the fact that, sooner or later, your KM strategy will need to be updated.

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