Knowledge Management is broken. We know because if these systems worked, employees would use them, but they avoid them like the plague.
What is Knowledge Management (KM)?
Knowledge management (KM) are software systems companies use to gather, maintain and share a wide array of internal information. The basic structure of KM systems has not changed in over 30 years and is based on card catalog systems (remember those?).
Why is it broken?
The simple answer is they’re an outdated technology. KM systems inherently treat knowledge as static in part because their underlying principles were developed before the Internet. Until recently, say 20 years ago, knowledge changed, and changed hands, at a glacial pace by comparison to today’s torrent of data, information, and knowledge that is exchanged in milliseconds.
The increased speed of knowledge engagement has made static knowledge bases obsolete. Also, legacy KM systems contain just a fraction of the knowledge in a company. The majority is locked away in people’s heads. Knowledge, and the invaluable well of untapped human intelligence, need to flow dynamically through an enterprise at light speed every day. If it doesn’t, employees are left waiting for answers and the company loses millions of dollars in potential revenue each year through lost productivity.
How do we know it’s broken?
We talked with dozens of employees at companies like SAP, Medtronic, and Costco. Everyone told us stories of constant interruptions from other employees looking for someone to answer their questions, fruitless searches slogging through the outdated company knowledge base, and in the end, getting wrong answers or no answers at all.
In other words, even though there may be a knowledge base in the company, almost no one uses it. In fact, they avoid it like the plague.
Instead, they post and pray on Slack and Teams, hope and spray emails across the entire company and clog up everyone’s channels and email boxes with useless or irrelevant messages. And the statistics show just how bad it is.
Employees are interrupted up to 48 times daily by mostly irrelevant questions from Slack attacks and internal email blasts.
Employees spend up to 1.8 hours a day searching for answers. That time adds up to millions of dollars of lost productivity every year.
New hires spend nearly 20% of their time trying to find the right information so they can get their work done.
Fortune 500 companies lose at least $31.5 billion a year by failing to share knowledge, according to International Data Corp. (IDC)
Interrupted up to 48x a day by messages that are irrelevant
Crowdsourced questions get wrong answers, which leads to lost sales, project delays, and lower employee morale
The solution is Knowledge Engagement (KE)
Radar's A.I. is replacing Knowledge Management with Knowledge Engagement.
Our Knowledge Engagement A.I. continuously maps the vibrant human network in a company, allowing us to pinpoint the right expert, and the right answer, right now.
The way it will be
Engage with the limitless wisdom of people anywhere in your company
Access at your fingertips with technology that is integrated into your existing workflows
Harnessing the individual expertise locked away in people’s heads
Generative AI automatically updates in real-time
Increased productivity and employee engagement with expert answers