| | November 201519CIOReviewWhy is Knowledge Management More Relevant TodayBy Vishal Agnihotri, Chief Knowledge Officer, Akerman LLPIn an organization, the richness of knowledge that is learned, built upon, interpreted and managed on a regular basis grows exponentially over time. Many organizations don't recognize that managing their own internal knowledge is far more challenging in a world where we are increasingly surrounded by more information and yet don't feel sufficiently informed. Some of an organization's knowledge is lost to employee turnover, some wasted in the absence of any systematic capture and re-use, and some will always be impossible to codify and share. The basis of sound Knowledge Management is the ability to identify the critical knowledge within an organization and then leveraging it to serve up at the right time for the right purpose. The classic KM approach of instituting a labor intensive process of gathering and disseminating that kind of knowledge for the greater good is hard to sustain and is giving way to an alternative approach that uses both technology and adaptive behavior to manage knowledge that is internal and external to an organization.Originally considered a means of preserving the institutional memory of longtime workers as they moved from one job to another or retired, events like the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and corporate mishaps like product recall failures, have highlighted why Knowledge Management is critical as a discipline to aggregate and share critical information. The purposes of Knowledge Management are to improve productivity in an organization and to propel the organization to be more competitive in the marketplace. That makes Knowledge Management a hybrid of organizational development and change management that contributes to efficiency and revenue generation. The need for Knowledge Management to build out an ecosystem of content, collaboration, and communication is greater in organizations that are geographically dispersed, with a wide spectrum of digital literacy among its employees who have varying needs for collaborating on projects or business opportunities.CIO's ensure that the infrastructure behind the firm's digital existence is humming well in the background. Chief Knowledge Officers tie together emerging enterprise knowledge needs with technology, revising outdated business practices to keep up with the changing nature of work and opening up honest dialog regarding information governance, learning and adopting technology for personal knowledge management. As the CKO of a law firm, I straddle the world of business strategy and technology, working closely with my firm's CIO and CMO. CKO's introduce their corporate citizens to a multi-dimensional approach of specific tools, processes and ideas that will enable faster and more effective access to useful and actionable intelligence. This actionable intelligence materializes through traditional database research, codifying explicit knowledge, strong Search capabilities and a powerful internal ecosystem that ties together the systems critical to business development and operations. Mega themes for KMThe broad themes that have amplified the need for KM in the past decade are:Diversity in contentWe create, curate and share digital enterprise information in many more forms today than ever before. Going beyond the standard MS Office documents, companies that have empowered their employees with video generation software and social streams find themselves in unchartered territory where they are addressing questions on shelf life, usage guidance and company policies around internal communications. CXO INSIGHTSVishal Agnihotri
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