Share the expertise
Knowledge management strategy: help more people use what your experts know
A knowledge management strategy is a plan for making important knowledge available to the people who need it. It covers what to preserve, how people find and use it, and who keeps it accurate. Start with a business decision that is difficult without an expert nearby. Buying a place to store documents comes later.
Measure whether someone can complete useful work with the knowledge, then give that knowledge an owner and a way to stay current.
Start with a decision people struggle to make
“Our knowledge is scattered” is a useful observation, but it leaves a team with a very large organising job. Ask what that scattering prevents someone from doing. Preparing a client report, answering an account question or covering a colleague’s meeting gives you a clearer starting point.
List a few recurring jobs and compare the cost of missing knowledge. Include the time spent finding an expert, the delay while someone waits, and the consequences of using an old answer. Choose a job where the information can be collected and tested with a small group.
Knowledge management includes people and working practices as well as information systems. APQC’s knowledge management resources describe that wider discipline. A folder alone cannot decide which agreement is current or persuade an expert to explain an exception.
Give the plan four connected parts
| Part | Decision to make | Evidence that it works |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Which job becomes easier or more reliable? | A person completes the agreed job with less avoidable searching. |
| Knowledge | Which sources, methods and judgement does that job require? | The person can locate the current records and recognise a gap. |
| Responsibility | Who checks, updates and approves the information? | Changes reach the collection through an agreed owner. |
| Use | Where does someone encounter this knowledge during work? | The collection is used in the actual handover or decision. |
Decide what is shared across the firm and what belongs to an individual client. A common reporting method may be useful to everyone. A client’s financial results may have a much smaller audience. Access should follow that distinction through search results, summaries and exports.
Assign ownership to a role that already understands the information. Give that person time to review it. An “owner” who cannot answer questions or make corrections is a name on a spreadsheet, which is rarely the missing ingredient.
Make updates part of the work that creates them
Said describes client reporting as one of the hardest processes to map. Each client needs different information, and each variation can bring different software requirements. The challenge also includes keeping people motivated to maintain those requirements.
That experience gives a knowledge strategy a practical test. When a reporting requirement changes, where is the decision recorded? Who checks it? How does the person preparing the next report find it? Build those steps into the client process rather than leaving a separate tidying job for Friday afternoon.
Keep source origin, validity dates and the date collected separate. In our current build, information that has not been seen again by its validity date loses confidence. A human resolves important missing or contradictory information. The purpose is to make uncertainty visible at the moment of use.
Measure useful work rather than document counts
Choose a normal job and an awkward version. Ask someone who did not assemble the material to complete both. Record what they found, where they needed an expert, and whether they used the correct current information.
Possible measures include time to prepare an acceptable brief, the number of unresolved questions at handover, or how often an old agreement reaches a decision. Use a starting measurement taken from the same job. More uploaded files do not establish a business improvement.
A short review should decide what to correct next. If the collection is ignored, inspect where people do the work and whether the answers are useful. Training everyone to open a portal will not fix missing information inside it.
Write a small plan you can review
Worked example
A plan for reporting requirements
Invented teaching example. No client outcome is claimed.
PURPOSE
Help another team member prepare the correct client report without reconstructing its requirements from old emails.
KNOWLEDGE
Shared reporting method, the client’s current agreement, metric definitions and approved exceptions.
RESPONSIBILITY
The account owner approves client requirements. The reporting lead owns the shared method.
An approved change updates the client record and links to its source.
TEST
A colleague prepares a report brief from the collection.
An expired requirement should produce a question for the account owner, rather than a guessed brief.
MEASURE
Record preparation time and missing decisions before and after the first collection. No improvement is assumed.
Further reading
Written by Said Lopez, founder of LeverageAI and author of Lean AI. Our guides draw on the method in the book and our work with clients.