The adage, “Knowledge is power,” has never been more relevant. In today’s fast-evolving business landscape, knowledge—the lifeblood of a skilled workforce—is what steers a company toward realizing its vision, leading to the creation of knowledge management solutions.

Building a knowledge repository by capturing, organizing, and cataloging information in a central place not only helps companies store and find information, but also ensures that knowledge is preserved. Indeed, many companies and vendors today employ this knowledge management model.

“While this traditional approach to knowledge management has its benefits, we have also seen its share of problems,” says John Way, president and CEO of Innovative Way—a leading workflow management solution provider. First, the traditional approach tends to produce information overload as each team within the organization starts capturing their knowledge. For example, each team may document their own travel reimbursement process, leading to multiple pages covering the same topic and causing confusion for other employees. Second, in the traditional approach, knowledge quality tends to degrade over time, because as teams re-organize and employees change roles, it leads to abandoned, out-of-date content. This problem worsens over time, forcing some companies to create a dedicated knowledge management team to continually organize and vet their knowledge repository. Finally, the third and biggest problem is knowledge is not organized by workflow or task in a traditional approach. Instead, content tends to be grouped and categorized by topic, for example, all travel reimbursement content is grouped together. So, if an employee needs help regarding instructions for his specific team, he will have to read through everything to find the relevant content specific to him—a time-consuming process. Finally, if the employee extracts this key nugget of information and puts it on his team’s intranet, he inadvertently magnifies the first problem, creating duplicate content.

This is why Innovative Way takes a different and unique approach to knowledge management. Way asserts, “Our experience has been that just-in-time knowledge embedded with tasks, as opposed to knowledge in the abstract, is much more effective. So instead of taking the traditional approach, our primary goal is to provide the right information to the right person at the right time.”

Delivering Knowledge Tailored for You

Innovative Way believes in a knowledge management approach that can deliver precise, trusted, and bite-sized knowledge and embed it in each task. As Way explains, “Imagine a salesperson needing help on classifying his travel reimbursement. He can go to the corporate intranet and probably find numerous articles on travel reimbursement classifications for every department. This employee can quickly get overwhelmed trying to figure out which article contains the instructions for his specific situation. Now, imagine a just-in-time approach where the sales department’s classification instructions are embedded with the task. The salesperson gets the help he needs right when he needs it, without needing to go elsewhere.” This is the value that Innovative Way brings to the table.

Though the concept of just-in-time knowledge is not entirely new, the use of this model in the knowledge management segment is still scarce. “Some of the clients we onboarded relied on mostly verbal knowledge-sharing,” says Way. Therefore, as a first step in the onboarding process, Innovative Way assesses their client’s level of knowledge maturity. In addition, Innovative Way assesses their client’s operational maturity. “Sometimes, we find that companies do not have any backup, cross-training, or business continuity processes in place. This means there is usually only one person who knows how to do a particular task, and usually that person has not written much down,” mentions Way. Establishing these baselines help company executives understand where the gaps are and enable Innovative Way to craft a roadmap towards a stronger and more stable business process model and custom-tailor a solution to help them reach that goal.

Making it Easy to Collaborate with Others

Innovative Way puts these knowledge management philosophies into practice through their flagship, cloud product, Pipeline.