How do you choose the best knowledge management tool for your team?

Knowledge managers shouldn't choose a tool for a specific team but look at the overall needs of the company and find a holistic solution. Finding specific tools for each team isn't efficient and creates Knowledge silos.

Define your goals tool agnostic! So don't define them like: - We want an online wiki with co-authoring and multilingual support .... But more like: - We want to work together in a document or file (specify concurrent users) - We need multilingual support. The solution needs to have German, English and Spanish language. - We desire automatic translations for user-input between those three languages as well. etc.

To measure the gap between the current situation and the desired situation, we usually hold meetings with the stakeholders of each department and identify the knowledge management needs. In addition, the knowledge management maturity evaluation questionnaire also helps to a great extent in this issue. After summarizing these informations, we select and implement the appropriate technique

Things to consider is your impact to your team's or organizational metrics. Are the documents being used? Are they up to date? Are they written to the lowest learner? (Remember, your veteran end user rarely needs to look at the material) Do you have a supporting knowledge for everything someone was trained? Are there gaps in your processes? Are you leaving it up to staff to guess what step to take next? Can they easily search for what they need? How are you communicating change? Is there one source of truth? You don't need to spend a ton of money to provide the above.

Listen to your stakeholders not only when they are called to a meeting to discuss "pain points" or officially brainstorm but in the daily ebb and flow of communication in your organization. You will see emails like " does anyone have a good example or template or precedent for X Y or Z" or "Golly gee, there must be an easier way to summarize this 500 page lease as I have no time for this right now" or "I'm tired of searching for something on the office intranet only to find it has spit out something totally lacking in relevance to my query". Everyone of those comments is Knowledge Management gold and they can arise in the most unexpected of places. The good knowledge manager must be a little like Sherlock, and ferret out the cues and clues!

Some organizations are in dire straits. They need to resurrect a program drowning in documentation. others have a situation that works well enough and only needs to be tweaked.

It's important to consider what tools are already in your organization's environment, what users are used to seeing, and what behaviors users are already accustomed to. Oftentimes, it is easy to be impressed with a beautiful user interface or a good price, but if the option does not integrate well with other tools your organization uses or your users will not intuitively know how and when to use it - it is most likely not worth the work it would take to bridge those gaps.

One thing to look for, which is often forgotten, is data exports. Can you get your data out of this system again? How does that work? Can you actually do something with that export? What's the file format? What are the costs? Do you need the supplier or can you do that yourself? Can you set parameters for the export (only this location; only recent stuff; etc)? Make sure to test this in any PoC or pilot!

Evaluate KM tools based on your team's specific needs, considering factors like ease of use, collaboration features, integration capabilities, and scalability. Choose a tool that aligns with your organizational goals and enhances knowledge sharing and collaboration among team members.

Start by defining your team's specific needs and compatibility with different platforms. For instance, during our software selection process, we compared features, costs, user interface intuitiveness, and integration capabilities across platforms like Confluence, Notion, and Trello. Trello's visual approach suited our agile workflows, while Confluence offered robust documentation features. Notion's flexibility and collaborative tools stood out for cross-functional projects. Your choice should align with your team's culture, workflow requirements, and scalability needs to unearth the treasure trove of efficient knowledge management.

Look at factors like ease of use, collaboration features, and scalability. For example, if you need quick access to shared documents, Google Workspace's collaboration tools might be ideal. Each tool is like a different car model; choosing wisely ensures a smooth and productive ride for your team's knowledge journey.

Technical writers will use the tool, and they rarely wish to change the tool they're currently using. From my experience, they're people of habit. Involving IT can be a hit or miss. I don't think it's particularly valuable, as most tools integrate super well and easily in most workflows. They tend to care about different things. The people I would definitely invite are people are the ones that would actually use the KB/KM tool. The people discovering content – this way you'll get a real feel for whether the app (and their search!) is actually good.

Most every tool will work well enough, so I focus on what works well for my users. For the less technical, we use a simple tool, and get the IT guys to automate more. For the IT staff, we use more complex tools. For personal KM and sharing in small teams, Evernote or OneNote might work superbly for those who have great practices. For any team with bad practices, no tool can pick up that much slack. The most important aspect of the tool is the ease at which it can capture. As time goes and budgets can absorb it, another tool can digest all of that capture to get it ready for reuse.

Remember that as a knowledge manager, you can ALWAYS provide training on tools. You will began to notice that tools and applications that you provide aren't used how they were intended. Sure, you can involve the team in selecting the tools, but provide training regardless. Remember that they are looking at tools with a bird's eye view; they might not see the big picture right away.

To bring together the knowledge management team and other employees of the organization, we must show them the results of implementing the tool. This result should be at the individual and organizational level so that employees have a correct understanding of the necessity of participation. In this case, the probability of participation and learning knowledge management tools and techniques increases.

It is important that your team is comfortable using the tools that are provided. User experience makes or breaks KM programs; if the team can use the KM tool with minimal extra effort, you may have a winner. If your team is confident and excited about using the tool, they will become promoters of the tool with no additional effort. As a knowledge manager, one needs the right tools, something they are confident about. Selling the tool to other teams internally will be more natural if they are confident about the features and the user experience.

One of the things I constantly look for in a tool is the number of "clicks" it takes for a user to get their answer or share content. If they have to scan through too many pages or multiple screens before getting anything useful, it's a UX failure, and your KM program needs a better tool (or a better-configured tool).

Review and refine your team's specific knowledge management needs and workflows. Choose a tool that aligns with these requirements, offering user-friendly features, customization options, and scalability for future growth

The tools and techniques of knowledge management are very diverse, but we should not make the mistake of using all of them. The best companies in the world in the field of knowledge management use only a few (about 3) practical knowledge management techniques. The nature of the company, the number of manpower, the average age of the employees, geographical distribution, and other factors are influential in choosing the appropriate knowledge management technique

To choose a knowledge management tool, we must pay attention to the important issue of "Is this tool suitable for the conditions of my team"? The number of team members and their geographical distribution are very important factors in choosing tools. For example, knowledge sharing in a team of 10 people who are in an office does not need much knowledge management software; But when these people work in different places, we need a knowledge management software

When discussing Knowledge Management tools, think about function. You need knowledge audits, knowledge graphs, automations, repositories..etc. As a rule of thumb, keep things simple. The best User Interfaces are the most simple. Like Google's, for instance.

I’ll answer this from the angle of PM2 (European Commission methodology for Project Management): 1. Assess Needs: Following PM2 guidelines, start by identifying your team’s needs. If real-time collaboration is crucial, Microsoft Teams can be excellent option. 2. User-Friendliness: PM2 emphasises efficiency. Confluence, with its easy navigation, supports creating and managing documentation seamlessly. 3.Integration: Ensure the tool integrates well with existing systems, as PM2 encourages interoperability. SharePoint fits well with Microsoft Office. 4.Scalability: Select a tool that grows with your team, aligning with PM2’s adaptability. 5. Security: PM2 values security. Provide robust version control & strong security for code repositories.

Nowadays AI is rapidly taking over knowledge related tasks and while human intervention-quality check,know how,expertize- will always be inevitable, conversational ai assistants trained on a company proprietary data (LLMs) and integrated with all other tools and repositories (ie via API) will provide answers to queries that are good enough. Mastering prompting skills and skillfully navigating On rapidly change g knowledge infrastucture is the skillset knowledge managemers must acquire