One of largest productivity killers in a business is the lack of inter-company knowledge reuse, where knowledge acquired by staff is not shared efficiently or is lost due to staff turnover.
Typically, knowledge / experience gained by an individual is not shared with other members of the
business, resulting in work processes being repeated by different people and possibly the same mistakes being made. Most information is saved in a variety of document formats and stored in directory structures such as network file shares, local hard drives, email mailboxes or otherwise; the retrieval of this information is usually a problem. Finding the required information in areas which are not well organized (have you seen the size and structure of your file share recently?), takes significant time and effort, and as volume increases, the problem worsens. In most cases, users eventually abandon the knowledge completely and redo everything from scratch, or use other methods to find information (such as referring to colleagues who usually have access to the required information).
The key to solving this problem is the implementation of knowledge areas which make it quick and easy for users to store and retrieve information. In many cases, this also involves a process of breaking down “resistance to change” which the employers might face in view of introducing a more “open” information framework. It is important for all involved to understand that in a company which instils a mentality of sharing, rather than protecting niche information, staff will operate much more efficiently with obvious benefits to all. Collaboration software better enables knowledge sharing.
Presently, one finds various applications which offer you solutions of knowledge sharing. These have out of the box functionality to enable users to create and manage their own knowledge data stores. Knowledge stores can have various formats, such as file / document based, whereby documents are stored and categorized using relevant keywords. Another format is a form based knowledge area which allows you to enter ad hoc information albeit in a structured manner (e.g. problem description, solution description, product relevance, version relevance).
All this information is then easily accessible to anybody who has permissions to the particular knowledge area. Wiki functionality is also available out of the box, as are discussions and forums. These capture tacit knowledge which is intrinsic to every discussion conversation, such as information which is typically exchanged in “reply-to all” email conversations, usually lost in user mailboxes. These discussions which feature in collaboration software packages can retain and share this knowledge.
News Lists, Shared Calendars, Task Lists, Contact Lists and other functionality are available out of the box, all of which better enable collaboration within the organization. Various Document Libraries (using pre-defined templates) can be used to organize all kinds of documents, from corporate / administration / HR documents, to project related documents. Typical lists stored in spreadsheets can be migrated to SharePoint, removing any limitations of the spreadsheet software (single user access), whilst introducing new benefits (validation of information entered).
Once information is captured and stored in a central repository, retrieval is the next critical step. User defined sorting, filtering and views based on metadata allow for ad hoc retrieval of information. Moreover, all content is crawled periodically, so that when a user performs a search, results are returned instantly. Using metadata, search scopes, and advanced search parameters one is able to narrow down results to arrive to the required documents much faster than if one had to sift through a typical information store such as a file share.
SharePoint today is a central platform in the Microsoft sphere; most Microsoft software integrates tightly with it, (MS Office 2007, MS Performance Point) whilst other software is completely SharePoint based, (MS CRM 3.0). Third party software vendors typically have webparts which plug into SharePoint to create dashboards of readily available information.