Biographical Information

Articles by Lauren Trees

How KM enhances productivity and the employee experience

KM helps employees feel supported, both by the organization and a community of colleagues. This reduces stress, improves job satisfaction, and offers knowledge workers an invaluable outlet for dealing with difficult managers, tough assignments, and other challenges that might otherwise push them out the door.

Looking to the future: 2022 KM outlook

The most drastic change KM has grappled with in the 2020s is the explosion of remote and hybrid work, which sparked an urgent need to enable virtual communication and critical information access.

Why virtual collaboration needs knowledge management

When it comes to figuring out how tools work on a technical level and how to fit them into the infrastructure, IT is the best in the business. But successful virtual collaboration requires much more than that, including clear communication, tailored trainings, role modeling, and policies that help people get their work done without driving their colleagues crazy.

The what, how, and why of KM rewards and recognition

State-of-the-art technology and hyper-efficient processes are meaningless if employees don't use them. Unfortunately, people have lots of reasons not to get involved.

Looking to the future: 2021 Insight

KM teams should focus not just on pushing new technology but also on how they can better support foundational capabilities such as collaboration and expertise location in the digital workplace.

Six ways KM supports organizations in the COVID-19 era

At some organizations, COVID-19 has driven a push to leverage certain knowledge-sharing tools more broadly than before.

The best cloud KM combines cutting-edge technology with smart oversight

Cloud-based KM requires a careful balance of innovation and restraint. The best results ensue when companies combine aggressive adoption of advanced technology with strong central oversight, traditional taxonomy, and flexible implementation to accommodate different parts of the business.

Putting knowledge in the flow of everyday work

If you design KM solutions to align with the problems employees need to solve, make it easy for them to access the available resources, and then build prompts and reminders into your business processes, you'll be well on your way to embedding KM into the culture and the way people work.

Get more for your KM money with benchmarks and a solid business case

Smart IT investments that cut down on routine, low-value KM work have the potential to enhance the user experience while lowering overall costs over time.

Knowledge management thrives on partnership

If a KM program historically has not played well with others, now is a good time to change the approach. And even if there are already strong collaborative relationships, strengthening those ties—and forging new ones with less obvious partners—can help prepare for the people, process, and technology changes taking shape as part of digital transformation.

Project teams and KM—Part 3
The benefits of identifying and sharing lessons learned across projects

The capture and transfer of lessons learned can be a differentiator between success and failure in a competitive project-based environment.

Project teams and KM – Part 2
Using communities and networks to share knowledge across products

The first article in this series discussed reasons why leading organizations should encourage project teams to exchange insights and experiences as part of a comprehensive knowledge transfer strategy. Next, we explore the role that virtual communities and networks play in facilitating cross-project collaboration and learning.

Project teams and KM – Part 1
Organizations win when project teams learn from collective experience

As a project team moves a project toward completion, it constantly discovers new contextual information, better ways of doing things and less successful methods that other teams should avoid. By insisting that project teams document and share what they learn, organizations can ensure that relevant best practices and lessons are applied in other, similar projects and situations.

Assessing your portfolio of knowledge management approaches

When an organization first decides to invest in better knowledge management, the team in charge often struggles to prioritize knowledge needs and select the right combination of tools and approaches to address them. Different parts of the business have different requirements, and it's hard to please everyone.

Cognitive Computing - Part 3
Challenges and lessons in cognitive computing

The next generation of cognitive applications will put computers even more firmly in the drivers' seat and require increasing confidence in their capabilities.

Although cognitive computing has tremendous potential to augment and enable knowledge work, its implementation should not distract KM programs from their core missions to retain critical knowledge and ensure its flow.

Cognitive Computing - Part 2
Applying cognitive computing to KM

This second installment takes a deeper look at the relationship between cognitive computing and knowledge management, focusing on the six use cases where cognitive systems show the most promise.

Cognitive computing - Part 1
Cognitive computing and the evolution of knowledge work

Cognitive computing, machine learning and predictive analytics will permeate every aspect of our lives and radically transform how we learn and interact in our digital lives.

Knowledge transfer mentoring—Part 3
mentoring as a springboard for networking and collaboration

When positioning mentoring as part of a knowledge management strategy, most organizations focus on how skill- and role-specific mentoring enables leaders and experts to pass on experiential knowledge to younger, less experienced colleagues. As I described in the first two articles of this three-part series, structured knowledge transfer is a key aspect of mentoring's value proposition and one of the biggest reasons why KM programs should incorporate mentoring into their suite of approaches. Mentoring can become an effective catalyst to break down silos, build boundary-spanning professional relationshipsand improve the quality of collaborative interaction enterprisewide.

Knowledge transfer mentoring—Part 2 Designing and implementing a mentoring program focused on knowledge transfer

The ideal mentor is one with both the right expertise and the right demeanor to impart that expertise.

Knowledge transfer mentoring—Part 1 Why your KM strategy should include mentoring

Often, knowledge transfer mentoring is tied to knowledge management, learning and development, workforce planning or succession management initiatives.

Accelerators of KM maturity: Part 4

When, how and why to measure KM initiatives and approaches

Accelerators of KM maturity: Part 3

Many organizations want to understand how to build a better knowledge management program. At member-based nonprofit APQC, we use a 146-question KM Capability Assessment Tool to help organizations evaluate the current state of their KM efforts and figure out how to advance to the next level.

Accelerators of KM maturity: Part 2

Why your KM program needs guidance from senior leaders and business stakeholders.

Accelerators of KM maturity: Part 1

Why you need to document your KM strategy and estimate its projected benefits

Putting enterprise content where people work

Best-practice organizations use process maps, team sites and mobile apps to get content in front of the right people at the right time.

Using KM to Leverage and Develop Experts

Anyone reading the headlines is aware of the current expertise shortages in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). While many companies are pouring money into recruitment initiatives to buy their way out of the problem, APQC has opted to look at the issue through a different lens. Namely, how can firms better leverage the experts they have while, at the same time, accelerating the rate of learning for new hires and mid-career professionals?,

In researching this topic, our goal was to understand the expertise gaps faced by scientific, technical and engineering organizations and the urgency associated with closing those gaps. . . .

Content Management: drivers of effectiveness’
Part 2:Tools and technologies to get the job done

Earlier this year, member-based nonprofit APQC partnered with KMWorld to uncover the truth about content management inside organizations. We wanted to find out which tools and technologies are popular, which trends show the most promise and what successful organizations are doing to pull ahead of the pack.

Content management: drivers of effectiveness
Part 1: Building the strategy and getting the right people involved