Transfer/Disseminate
The final step is Transfer/Disseminate. Here, decisions are made on who will have access to the knowledge and how they will have access to it.
The knowledge will need to be transferred to the right part of the organization. The audience must be clearly understood to ensure that the appropriate method of delivery is defined, and security is applied to the knowledge.
The audience may include active or retired employees. If the audience is HR personnel only (instructional internal documentation), then the knowledge may not be suitable for use via self service. If the intended audience is employees, the knowledge should be made available through a self service mechanism which has search and retrieval capabilities, dynamic FAQs, and links to current announcements. HR representatives should have easy access to knowledge through an integrated HR service management solution, so searches return results in context to cases, their descriptions, categories and even personnel information (such as location, dept, employment type etc) .
Informed Decisions
Now that knowledge has been dispersed, the organization can make informed decisions to support HR services, based on previous organizational learning.
Knowledge Management is a cyclical process, therefore this is not really the last activity. As part of Continual Service Improvement, measurements and improvements will need to take place to ensure that knowledge is kept valid. A knowledge base can quickly become overloaded with old and irrelevant knowledge if it is not measured for effectiveness, and the knowledge program can fail.
Management activities that need to be continually undertaken include:
- Review knowledge due for review/retirement
- Amend or retire knowledge when necessary
- Undertake periodical knowledge gap analysis
- Review metrics for knowledge effectiveness
Benefits of Knowledge Management Good Practices
The benefits of implementing an effective Knowledge Management process in line with good practices include:
- Improved quality of service to users
- Improved user satisfaction
- Increased adoption of self service
- Higher tier 0 rates
- Reduced time to respond to HR cases
- Reduction in training time and costs
