The Importance of Automation for Knowledge Management

No matter what an organization specializes in, there are certain frustrations that show up across the board. One of the biggest is the amount of time that’s wasted just looking for information.

Between searching through internal repositories and interrupting coworkers over Teams, Slack, e-mail etc., that amount of time can stretch from minutes to hours, and even from hours to days.

Think about how often your team gets pulled off their strategic priorities to answer redundant questions, simply because people can’t find the answers. What does that add up to across your entire company, over months and years? That’s where a data warehouse could come in handy — something to make existing data accessible to team members.

Knowledge management platforms were created to put an end to this problem. They can radically reduce the amount of time, resources, expertise and spend that had been all but wasted previously. But not all platforms work the same.

Many knowledge management systems require you to curate and upload every docu­ment you want to include in the platform, making a file-by-file decision about what’s valuable for the platform and what’s not. That process con­tinues even after the platform has been deployed.

Being tasked to upload a file sounds simple, though in actuality it is amplifying a bigger problem. It creates the ongoing issue around how to ensure that new and/or updated information is continually added to the system. Decision-makers need to be trained in which future documents should be included and which should be ignored. It’s ultimately time-consuming, labor intensive, and often results in low adoptability as users don’t trust the latest information to be in the system. That actually gets in the way of business decisions.

You’ll be best served by a platform that automates the process by integrating into other systems, rather than requiring that everything be shifted onto it. For example, many organizations already have dozens or hun­dreds of SharePoint sites. An automated system continually indexes the information across all sites ensuring the platform stays up to date. When someone adds an asset or changes an existing asset, that file is automatically indexed. When someone deletes an asset, that asset is purged from the system. It also eliminates the issue of moving assets from any already-secured internal systems and firewalls which is especially critical in terms of ensuring compliance with user-level privacy and security standards.

Simply put, businesses do not have time to upload and curate data. It is too time-consuming. No system should put that time type of burden on its users. And while uploading (or dragging and dropping) a document is demonstrated as easy; it just does not scale across an enterprise.

As you scale users, teams or data repositories, platforms with automation capabilities flex with your company. Organizational users can quickly expand from the pilot team to more than tens of thousands of users—automatically democratizing insights and knowledge across an organization.