Knowledge management experts provide KM predictions for 2023

As KM leaders look toward another new year, lessons from the COVID pandemic are still becoming clear. It’s more important than ever to successfully merge and manage knowledge management insights with business transformation.

According to Lauren Trees, principle research lead at APQC, KM will continue to compete with digital workplace initiatives. “When the pandemic took off, KM teams stepped into the breach to help organizations adapt to digital work,” she said in APQC’s opinion column. “However, this has been a double-edged sword. KM gained brand awareness and credibility by solving urgent problems, but some stakeholders got confused about KM’s scope and purpose along the way.” 

Knowledge management plays an important role in the digital workplace, but KM is not just about managing cloud-based apps and repositories.  A good KM strategy involves identifying the organization’s critical knowledge and ensuring it gets both captured in systems and transferred among people. Content management and virtual collaboration can be gateway drugs to get the business hooked on KM, but KM needs to build on that foundation with strategic solutions to protect and replicate critical knowledge. Otherwise, it may get subsumed into digital initiatives that are more about the pipes than the knowledge running through them, she said.

Laurie Long, chief customer officer at Allego, predicts companies that count customer success as a revenue-generator will gain an edge in 2023.

“As we face turbulent times, it will be more important than ever to ensure your organization claims every advantage possible. In the year ahead, having a holistic approach to revenue enablement will give companies a leg up. Prioritizing customer success—not just sales—as a contributor to revenue will give B2B companies a competitive edge through lead sensing,” said Long. “By connecting with customers and understanding their business opportunities and challenges, CS is a great source of customer-based leads. The companies that have close on-going partnerships between CS and sales teams and better insights into customer needs will be the ones with truly satisfied customers, long-term relationships, and higher revenue.”

Gleaning insights from personalized data within individualized situations at work will become more common in 2023 and beyond, said Jack Berkowitz, ADP chief data officer.

“Going into 2023, I think you're going to see the continuing drive to set context about individuals, but by using data about a lot of people to help set that personalized context. We're going to see the interpretation of information down at a ‘one-person-at-a-time view’ more and more,” said Berkowitz. “The integration of people analytics into HR tech tools is helping business leaders make employee-focused decisions. We're seeing it in products right now—individual training recommendations for a person to project their next career step. Nudges that recognize a life event that might prompt a recommendation for someone to make a change to their benefits. So you'll see more personalized, individualized situations at work.”

Antti Nivala, CEO and co-Founder of M-Files, believes instant messaging and video conferencing will replace email. “In 2023, video conferencing and instant messaging will begin to replace email as the de facto means of collaboration. Since these tools promote live conversations and content collaboration in a work-from-anywhere environment, we can expect to see employees continue to turn to them instead of traditional methods of communication to simulate face-to-face interactions. Emerging technologies like metaverse and avatars will also start to gain popularity, especially in industries that collaborate around physical products,” said Nivala.

He also predicts natural language processing (NLP) will enhance how knowledge workers find relevant information. “In 2023, AI-based solutions will better understand industry-specific domain language—or  context-specific user behavior—as advances in natural language processing and the capacity to understand user intent make their way into business applications,” Nivala said. “This will significantly enhance how knowledge workers search for information and allow information management systems to better deliver relevant information to end users, even before they begin looking.”

Barry Cooper, president, CX division, NICE, thinks data-driven strategies will dominate in 2023. Organizations will finally recognizing that the voice of the customer does not come from just calls, but also, from the web, chat, social and multiple digital touchpoints—harnessing the power of AI and automation to optimize every customer experience in real-time and learn from every interaction, according to Cooper.