Latest Knowledge Management Trends

By CIOReview | Monday, October 12, 2020

For the organizations that are struggling with knowledge management, new technology solutions can be of help.

Fremont, CA: The field of knowledge management (KM) is quickly evolving and embracing new disciplines, including semantic technologies and artificial intelligence, as prime parts of the growing field. Here are three trends that can be expected to increase over the next year and beyond.

A clear understanding of Knowledge Management and Enterprise AI-powered by ontologies and knowledge graphs – One of those tangible business benefits for knowledge management is that it lays the building block for real artificial intelligence within an organization. Foundational KM activities such as taxonomy and tagging, content kinds and content cleanup, content governance, and tacit knowledge capture are all vital to an organization’s goals of combining their knowledge, data, content, and automated methods of pushing it to the right users and assembling it for better value and action. With a trustworthy KM foundation, AI isn’t something that organizations can dream of for another day.

Acceptance of the enabling role of technology in KM – KM has the impression of being a “soft” skill, and many KM practitioners actively reinforce that concept. The reality is that KM is a mixture of “soft” and “hard” skills, and the best KM efforts bring these together. A good KM encompasses a blend of tacit knowledge, unstructured content, and structured data, and must leverage today’s technologies to effectively capture, manage, relate, share, and find that combination of knowledge, information, and data. Technology is just an enabling factor to successful KM. However, the field as a whole increasingly recognizes the integral nature of this technology.

Recognition of KM organizations and mandates as a vital success factor – It is important to understand that KM doesn’t just happen in organizations. For many years, organizations have asked many individuals to practice “hero KM,” in their free time or have offered a big title like Chief Knowledge Officer without the authority, reporting lines, or staff to effect change. Today, organizations are moving more toward building functional KM organizations. This trend is fueled by some of the others, namely recognizing KM business value and its vital role at the center of AI. Organizational design is increasingly overlapping with KM efforts, where training, designing, and coaching is a fledgling KM unit and an organization. The successful establishment of this kind of unit is a critical success factor to broader KM.