Knowledge Management, A Good Practice for HR

[lyndarees]

By implementing Knowledge Management, you have the opportunity to improve the quality of service delivered to your employees, increase satisfaction, and reduce the cost of maintaining and managing HR services.   In fact, we've seen customers reduce their HR administrative tasks by 60%-80% by implementing knowledge management in their organizations.

Knowledge Management focuses on ensuring that the right information is delivered to the right place or person, at the right time, enabling informed and timely decisions.   Informed decision making enables HR to be more efficient and improve the quality of service delivered.    

In order to provide this information, context-driven knowledge needs to be created. A knowledge base becomes the single system to both manage and access this information.  

Data goes through a transformation process before it truly becomes useful knowledge. Data is captured, stored, analyzed, transformed into information that is useful, and made available for use.

Capturing information throughout the entire HR service life cycle enables HR to grow their knowledge content organically, and keep it in context to the business.

Following a Data-to-Information-to-Knowledge-to-Wisdom (DIKW) structure, where information is captured, stored, analyzed, and transformed into useable knowledge before 
it is transferred for use, we can walk through some knowledge activities that can be easily be put to use.

Knowledge is built from data, but data has little meaning by itself.
 To provide meaning, some kind of relationship or context needs to be put around the data to transform it for use in order to put it to action.

Some high level major activities in Knowledge Management include:

• Capture Information

• Store Information

• Transform to Usable Knowledge
• Disseminate
• Make Informed Decisions

This week lets walk through the first two activities, Capturing Information and Storing Information.

Capture Information

As all knowledge starts with data, an organization can take advantage of the data captured from HR Service Management processes. For instance, during an HR case life cycle, information is captured and recorded in context to the employee.   The details of the HR case include the type of case: whether it be a benefits question, W2 request, tuition reimbursement inquiry etc.   All of the interaction details, as well as closure information are also captured in the case.

During the research stage of the case, an HR representative may have searched an established knowledge base but not found the appropriate article, and may find the right information on another website or repository, recording this in the case for the employee - so they can move on to resolution.

All of this information is valuable and provides a foundation for putting into relevant context during the next stages of Knowledge Management, and is an opportunity for knowledge improvement.

Storing Information

At this stage the HR representative can create a 'draft' knowledge article directly from an HR case to include in the knowledge base for future use.   Information is captured and stored directly from the HR record.

By including this as part of the HR Case Management process, the representative is not performing an extra or separate task for Knowledge Management, but an integrated, overlapping activity that benefits HR Service Management as a whole. The content has become easy to capture, and the HR organization will soon be learning from its own experiences.

The HR Service Management system is a valuable source of data for the knowledge base, and should ideally be integrated for efficient data capture.

- Next week I'll walk through transforming this information to useable knowledge.