Using SharePoint for Knowledge Management

Picture this scene: It's 11:30 pm on Tuesday night, and the director of product marketing is furiously trying to finish up a product brochure vital to a huge business development presentation Wednesday morning. Scanning through her hard drive for product specification documents, email for attachments from colleagues distributed around the globe and digging through the file folder in her desk, she's short on time and long on confusion.

Where is the most up-to-date technical documentation? How can she be sure that the document sent to her from a product analyst at 4:45pm Tuesday hasn't already been updated by a colleague in Japan? This could be a multi-million dollar win for the company, which in today's business landscape is a gold mine. She does not want to be the weak link.

The Word documents cluttering her desktop and papers blanketing her desk signify a treasure trove of information—but is it really treasure, or simply information overload? It's 11:55 pm, and the final product brochure is due at midnight. Holding her breath and making some final edits, she hopes the information she's included isn't outdated or incorrect. Only time will tell if her bet was well placed.

This scenario isn't as uncommon as one would think—today, data is expanding at a seemingly exponential rate: How can you tame this wild frontier and channel its unbridled power for good, actionable business decisions?

Hiring more employees to help stem the tide of this information overload is a common thought, but in today's economic landscape, businesses are hard pressed to hire more people when they believe their current employee base can take on the additional load and improve the bottom line. By instituting a knowledge management (KM) initiative, and utilizing supporting technology to properly support it, organizations can tame rampant content proliferation while still ensuring business productivity remains high.

According to Gartner Research, KM has a simple definition: "A formal program to manage an organization's intellectual assets." So, in essence, KM seeks to put rigor and structure around the way organizations' data and content are created, published, managed and shared in order to meet the specific needs of the business.

Common Goals for KM Initiatives

Managing an organization's intellectual assets can mean many things to many people. Taking into account that each business is unique in exactly what it needs for the sake of getting information out of people's heads and hard drives into a common repository for all to share, there are common goals for KM projects:

• Discoverability: having the right people have access to the right documents, at the right time;
• Single source of truth: one place to go and find content;
• Consistency: ensuring that documents and information are meeting the organization's pre-defined layout and branding policies;
• Authority: making sure subject matter experts truly have the final word on the documents they generate;
• Empowerment: compel more people to contribute their thoughts, ideas and content to help further organizational goals;
• Ease of collaboration: don't let traditional organizational and geographical barriers stem the tide of seamless teamwork to complete complex projects; and
• Storage clarity: definitive guidance as to where exactly particular content should be located.

Today, legacy information platforms, multiple hard drives, file shares, email and even hard paper still pervade many enterprises. Once workers get used to their own system of working, it is hard to break them out of that mold and show them a new way... and as long as they deliver results, who cares how they got there, right?

Well, Not exactly

In order to streamline management costs and IT administrators' time, many organizations are adopting Microsoft SharePoint in order to provide that one home for enterprisewide knowledge.

Why Microsoft SharePoint? Already common to many workers using the Microsoft Office suite of products such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and more, it helps organizations advance knowledge management initiatives by:

• Increasing productivity by giving people quick and easy access to the business information they need to complete their tasks;
• Lowering costs with a unified platform and infrastructure for companies' portal, document management, collaboration, intranet, extranet and Internet sites; and
• Rapidly responding to business needs with out-of-the-box applications and a highly scalable platform for solutions to meet organizations' unique requirements.

With new and enhanced social features, records management capabilities and simplified application development in the latest platform release of SharePoint, it's no secret that many enterprises have adopted the platform in order to improve KM among their often distributed workers.

The Road to KM in SharePoint

For companies that are looking to utilize SharePoint in their pursuit of successfully achieving their KM initiatives, it is vital that they address these critical components:

• Capture: centralize all the company's digital assets and information into one repository;
• Storage and access: manage SharePoint's native storage and unify content residing on disparate legacy systems throughout the organization;
• Delivery: make sure that the right people have access to the right content, at the right time;
• Preservation: protect knowledge against accidental deletion or corruption, meet compliance policies and institute an automated end-of-life strategy that meets organizations' specific needs; and
• Management: monitor and govern the KM system without overburdening IT resources or exposing the enterprise to unnecessary risk.

Capture
It is vital that organizations utilizing SharePoint for KM architect their environment to ensure it becomes truly the single home for the creation, presentation and management of all content—regardless of where it originally resides. This can take several forms, including:

• Digitizing paper media and uploading it to SharePoint;
• Associating metadata to this digitized media for indexing and enterprise search;
• Migrating legacy data stores into SharePoint while maintaining all associated metadata in order to not only consolidate the location of content, but also reduce legacy licensing costs; and
• Presenting data residing in legacy stores-including file shares—directly through SharePoint, providing a single point of access for end-users to interact with all enterprise content.

The end goal here is not simply to take all content that resides throughout the business and immediately store it in SharePoint. Without a well thought-out content migration strategy, KM initiatives may stall before they even truly begin due to unnecessary disruption to ongoing projects.

Storage and Access
The next key to a successful KM initiative utilizing SharePoint is ensuring proper storage and access. How will this voluminous content be stored in an efficient and cost-effective manner? How will an increasingly globally distributed employee base be able to easily download and review these documents—and have confidence that it is the most up-to-date version? It's vital that SharePoint's native SQL Server content databases are properly utilized and the environment is architected properly to ensure unfettered access to SharePoint by all employees no matter where they work. Some key points here include:

• Managing the growing amount of unstructured data-including documents, audio files, video files and PDFs—stored in SharePoint in order to maximize its potential for scalability and performance;
• Efficiently archive content in a manner that ensures satisfaction of all internal and external compliance objectives, as well as optimizing the performance of your KM platform in SharePoint;
• Deliver real-time access to up-to-date data to geographically dispersed knowledge workers, regardless of location; and
• Ensure unified accessibility rights management of all end-users, so productivity does not fall victim to red tape and bureaucracy.

By priming SharePoint to properly store the ever-growing amount of data and content generated by organizations today and ensuring that all employees have the ability to retrieve the documents they need without worry about where they happen to be working, organizations can take the next step to ensuring their KM initiative does not fall flat. 

Delivery
What good is a KM initiative if it cannot provide the content to the people who need it, when they need it? Organizations must have a unified presentation platform—in this case SharePoint—for all content, be it in file shares or legacy databases and ensure it is subject to enterprise-content search. Additional considerations include:

• Unified and appropriately governed delivery of content, regardless of source and type;
• Timely delivery of comprehensive reporting for management and compliance purposes;
• Efficient delegation of proper permissions and access to new members and units of the organization.

Business doesn't stop for technology inefficiency—it is essential that KM platforms do not fall victim to this harsh reality.