5 knowledge management tools you need to know more about

Learning from past experiences is one of the secrets to constantly growth and evolution.

And in the case of companies, we can say that knowledge management is even more important. The knowledge and learning of each employee are vital to future decision-making and to perform the most diverse routine activities and tasks.

But how do we spread that knowledge from one employee to the entire team? Nowadays, this is possible thanks to the knowledge management tools, and some of them are free of charge.

Do you use any of these knowledge management tools in your company?

What are knowledge management tools?

Knowledge management tools are a means to collect and share intellectual assets or know-how of the employees to increase company productivity and innovation.

Basically, these are technological tools that store employees’ knowledge so it can be used by the organization.

In other words, instead of having these personal experiences stored in each person’s mind or on their computers, they are now available and shared in the same database.

This is all possible through knowledge management tools that can be used in your business.

What is the importance of knowledge management tools?

The main goal of the knowledge management tools is to turn tacit knowledge (personal and non-automatic) into explicit knowledge (of general domain and documented).

Therefore, these technologies can identify, create, present and distribute knowledge throughout the company, fostering communication in the company.

Therefore, the stored information that comes from different areas of an organization can be assessed and structured in order to provide key data for the creation of strategies and to help in the decision-making process.

The knowledge management results are:

• Greater agility in management
• More efficiency in decision-making
• Boost in competitive advantage
• It is easier to anticipate difficulties and to prevent them
• Ability to detect opportunities and exploit them

How these tools work

Initially, the idea of managing knowledge seems to be confusing — and even inspired by science fiction movies, but in fact, with such rapid technological development and digital transformation, there are many software options able to perform this function in a practical, fast, and accessible way.

These knowledge management tools work in order to encode the inserted information and classify them.

Thus, these systems are able to help employees to forecast how the consequences of a particular fact in the company will be based on the previous cataloged experiences.

Given the need for decision-making, knowledge management software will help to access all the company’s knowledge so that the most appropriate solutions can be chosen.

To this end, these tools help to answer some questions.

Questions answered by knowledge management tools:

• Has the company been through this in the past?
• How did professionals that have been through similar situations solve the problem?
• What actions had positive results? How about the negative results?
• What should be done, based on our experience and results?

5 knowledge management tools

There are many types of software able to help to put knowledge management into practice in your business. Some options are more comprehensive, and others act in more specific functions.

Basically, you can choose between:

• Cloud-based collaborative software, which helps to share the information, but which are not specific to knowledge management. Examples: Trello, Microsoft Teams and even shared drives, such as Google Drive and OneDrive.
• Softwares created especially for knowledge management purpose

You can combine some software options or choose the one that is more appropriate to the goals desired by your company.

Learn more about 5 tools that can help you in the knowledge management process:

1- Bitrix24

A free online collaboration platform. It integrates the company’s areas through features such as a social intranet, video chat, project management, and cloud documents. Bitrix24 has more than 2 million user companies around the world.

2- AnswerHub

Unlike the other tools, AnswerHub works in a Q&A pattern.

It also helps to create projects and provides the knowledge base to store and share in the company. It is a tool used by large companies such as LinkedIn, GE, and eBay.

3- Confluence

With a complex search tool, the software allows working and collaborating in projects without the need to change the tool. In addition, it provides access to a knowledge base for the publication and access of the information.

It is used by Nasa, Spotify, and Lufthansa.

4- Timeline

It allows users to insert images, videos, links, and audio for knowledge registration and systemization, and can even be used to build a timeline for a project.

It is easy to use, all it takes is to fill the information in a sheet in Google Docs.

5- SoundCite

Sharing experiences and knowledge in a more attractive way is always a good option. SoundCite offers the feature of inserting audio files — you can record the desired information.

It is not necessary to open another window or tab to listen to the audio recording.

Knowledge management, in addition to helping decision-making, also helps to strengthen the company’s culture, the results’ strategy management and the alignment of the teams around objectives and goals, one of the fields of expertise of Siteware and its STRATWs.

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