Knowledge management in a COVID-19 world
In just a few months, COVID-19 has impacted businesses around the globe in fundamental ways that are still being realized.
Remote work has skyrocketed, business forecasts and models are changing, and the technologies that are relied upon to interpret events, communicate, and collaborate are more important than ever.
KMWorld, in partnership with Starmind, is in the process of fielding a major study on how knowledge workers' lives are changing and how companies are currently approaching digital transformation and knowledge management.
In a recent webinar, Stefan Gass, CMO and head of growth, Starmind, and Joe McKendrick, analyst, Unisphere Research, discussed key research insights on how KM is changing in a COVID-19 world.
The objective of this survey is to gauge the impact COVID-19 is having on businesses, identify ongoing challenges, and offer best practice solutions, according to McKendrick.
Remote workers now make up 51%-75% of the workforce throughout different companies, according to the survey.
The new world of workplaces and collaboration is showing consistency in productivity among 37% of remote workers, McKendrick said, while 13% of respondents noted that productivity dropped about 5%.
When it came to the loss of productivity, the top challenges included communication issues, difficulty getting to information within silos, lack of access to information, and there was more time spent searching for information, according to McKendrick.
About 50% of organizations were somewhat agile when it came to transitioning remotely, according to the survey. Companies already had a few employees that worked remote but they still faced some challenges when it came to having a full-scale remote workforce, McKendrick said.
Respondents noted that the most helpful software for a potentially turbulent economy includes collaboration/knowledge sharing tools (ex: slack), customer service tools (ex: chatbots), workforce analytics, employee experience, and personalized customer experience solutions.
Forty percent of companies surveyed said they were somewhat seeing benefits from using AI, McKendrick said. AI was delivering tangible benefits for these companies when it came to the efficiency/replace manual processes, improve customer experiences/satisfaction, and automation.
Due to this survey the implications of COVID-19 on knowledge management shows that trustworthy and easy-to-find information is critical during uncertain times, Gass said.
There should be a greater emphasis on flexibility throughout the organization. Digital transformation and the move to the cloud open up innovative ways to share information.
AI is essential to help provide digital transformation at high speed, Gass said. There will be more reliance on KM for consistent information and guidance.
An archived on-demand replay of this webinar is available here.