Information has transformed the way we do business but information gathering without a clear purpose is detrimental to realising your organisation’s goals. Harvesting the endless crop of information available just to feed the process of collection, collation, and analysis can often distract from focusing on the key decisions that will have the highest impact on your business, lead to intellectual laziness, and erode your confidence to ‘act’ as analysis paralysis sets in.
In an increasingly globalised world, organisations must prioritise knowledge over information to achieve their desired outcomes, increase their financial performance, and improve their competitiveness.
When we conceived of Complete our aim was to minimise the time spent on repetitive tasks. There are many schools of thought that evidence that reducing manual processes can increase efficiency and boost productivity. Additionally, we fully believe in the use of technology to streamline business processes so that people can have more time to innovate. However, beyond this we wanted to create a solution that would harness the knowledge of its users in a way that increased knowledge retention and accelerated the onboarding of new team members.
The end result is a feature rich, powerful database with modules you can combine to create the right solution for your business.
Here are 5 ways Complete can improve your knowledge management
1. Capture tacit knowledge
Our notes, and messaging modules capture the elements of information that are often erased from formal documents as they contribute to their creation but are not necessary to include in the final version. This can be the exchange of ideas, a point of negotiation, or even the historical events that led to contract variations, service specification updates, or terminations of agreements. In our experience, when new staff enter a team it’s not always obvious ‘why’ certain decisions were made even if existing staff intuitively know because they were part of the decision making process.
2. Document implicit knowledge
Our Workflow module captures the processes and actions that are often assumed ‘business as usual’ to existing team members but complex and obscure to new starters. Learning a new process takes time, mishaps are commonplace, and deviations are likely when users believe they can make quick improvements. Creating set workflows to capture standard processes allows users to quickly familiarise themselves with the inputs and outputs of your business. Improvements that are suggested are then assessed properly, before assimilation, especially when changes have the potential to impact the whole team, service, or organisation.
3. Store explicit knowledge
Our Document Management module provides a central repository for all your digital documents. Document meta data supports the swift identification of content and automated version control provides a speedy way to build a library of archives that are permanently linked to the most recent document. Folders allow you to group documents into logical sets and our ‘related documents’ function connects separate documents that impact on one another. The output is a tightly organised, shared working space that pools the explicit knowledge within your teams to make it readily accessible to the right people. The outcome is faster decision making, increased collaboration, and a reduction in duplication of effort.
4. Increase collaboration and encourage knowledge sharing
Complete is cloud deployed and accessible to those you grant access to. Team, service, or organisational boundaries are no longer a barrier to sharing knowledge as our flexible licencing allows you to grant permission to internal, and external partners. As you learn to collaborate across boundaries your teams will adapt process within your solution that further encourage engagement, expanding use and increasing the knowledge shared.
5. Increase knowledge retention
As businesses evolve, or organisations transform, people move on to new adventures. Oftentimes this leads to a loss of their knowledge and experience – things that are hard to capture in an exit interview or articulate to new team members. Complete collates, over time, the elements of ‘doing business’ that reflect the knowledge and experience lost allowing new team members to quickly familiarise themselves with the shared history that existing team members might take for granted. Supporting your documents are records of meetings, notes, actions, reminders, and messages that fill in crucial gaps for the who, what, when, and why queries that new members will have. Data is secure and access crafted in a way that allows teams to freely explore your solution to build their own knowledge and contribute to the success of your business.
Learn more about Complete CLM and some of the solutions we’re building to streamline business processes and support SMEs to maximise their resources.
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