Transform To Useable Knowledge
During this stop in the Knowledge Management journey, the knowledge artifact is ready for formatting, routing to a subject matter expert(s) for review and amendment, final approval, and publication.
The information captured and stored in the HR Case provides the foundation for transforming knowledge into a useable form by providing relationships and context to the data. The case may include details such as the category, the employees location, their department, and how the employee reported the case (their description). For instance, let's imagine the employee is located in Singapore and they reported the case with a description of "I need to know the policy for taking extended time off". This information is being carried over to the knowledge artifact and is valuable in creating context driven, usable knowledge. We know the article will be for a Singapore audience (and may even be only for the Sales department), the terms used for leave of absence requests may be different than US based employees, so we may want to include those in the article. It's important to include terms employees use in their searches and case creation to frame knowledge, as this is often overlooked from a knowledge creation perspective.
Well-written knowledge will facilitate the use, reuse, or adoption of the knowledge base, and usually includes clear instructions or steps. These steps can be bulleted or numbered and include screenshots, attachments such as PDFs and word documents, videos, as well as links to other websites.
The knowledge artifact will then go through a review process. Normally, at least one role is assigned to managing knowledge from a review standpoint. A typical role for this part of the process is a Knowledge Engineer. The Knowledge Engineer may have responsibility for reviewing the format of the knowledge artifact, then consult with a Subject Matter Expert (SME) for accuracy and relevance. The use of SMEs in the Knowledge Management process is paramount as they provide, as the name implies, the expertise. This responsibility should not be mixed with that of the Knowledge Engineers; their responsibility is to engage the SMEs at the appropriate time. An SME in the above example may be a Tier 2 or 3 representative or HR personnel in the Benefits (or other) HR department.
Next week let's walk through transferring/disseminating the knowledge article - who will have access to the knowledge and how they will have access to it.
