When you need to find a key document, the last thing you want to hear from a colleague is, “It’s on the shared drive” or “It’s in SharePoint.” Searching for specific information in an unorganized sea of data and folders is a sure way to waste your time and leave you frustrated.
But for many agencies and organizations, this is exactly how they operate each and every day. Each staff member is collecting and creating critical data, so file after file gets added to a shared drive. New files get created, versions multiply, copies get saved on local drives.
Without a system in place – and ongoing curation – to keep things organized and easily findable, your information quickly becomes a jumbled mess.
It’s information overload, and it’s a challenge that’s right up our alley.
Let’s take a closer look.
How We Got Here
In their early days, most organizations are able to manage how their information is stored with little or no assistance. But as they grow, it quickly becomes apparent that their default way of storing data simply hasn’t scaled or kept up with the pace of the work.
More employees means more information and more variables in how and where files are stored. As a result, institutional knowledge becomes exponentially harder to manage.
A specific file is difficult to find, so someone duplicates it in multiple locations. Employees mistakenly work from an older version of a document, leading to confusion and misinformation. Stakeholders can’t find what they need to make critical decisions with confidence.
All this disorganization costs money: in the time employees spend looking for information, in missed opportunities from not knowing key information, in increased storage costs, and on and on.
Having an intuitive knowledge management system to address this challenge saves money and makes an organization more effective.
Powerful Knowledge Sharing
Knowledge management, at its core, is about developing a process for how to best organize and utilize your information. Effective knowledge management helps you find the files and data you need (data pull), and present the right information to the people who need it (data push). With a user-friendly knowledge management system and ongoing curation of your information, this push and pull of data becomes easy.
The Push: Evident Information
In many cases, a stakeholder may not know that relevant information exists for a given issue. But with a sophisticated knowledge management system and process, you can present key information to individuals before they know to search for it.
Knowledge management can help you organize your information so the right files are visible to the right people, without overloading anyone with too much information. Wouldn’t it be nice to provide evident information to the people who need it, when they need it?
The Pull: Information Discoverability
Discoverability of information is key to an efficient business operation. Time spent searching through disorganized files means wasted labor and can cost precious time during crucial scenarios.
In a perfect world, it would be easy to find the information you need, every single time – and that’s exactly what a knowledge management system does. You want a platform, like Tesla’s, that is intuitive and user-friendly, with hands-on support so your files stay organized no matter how complex your organizational structure.
The result? You can find the right information at the right time to help you make the right decisions.
Do You Really Need Knowledge Management? When Do You Bring in the Experts?
Sure, you could keep going with the status quo, searching for a needle in a haystack and hoping your lack of organization doesn’t come back to bite you at a key moment.
Or you could hand off your information overload challenge to our skilled knowledge management experts and reap the benefits:
- Easily findable information
- Confident decision-making
- Less labor waste
- Reduced costs
- Ability to seize opportunities
With the right knowledge sharing system and process in place, the push and pull of data becomes seamless. No matter the size of your team, you should all be able to access the information you need, when you need it, and move forward with confidence.
How can we help solve your information overload challenge?
Contact Tesla today to find out.
Organizing your data is a huge step, but it’s only the first step toward unleashing the power of your institutional knowledge. Check back for the next part in our blog series when we look at how to distill your data down to what’s important.