Do we look for last year’s financial report for the sake of it? Of course not—we’re looking for an answer. But, lacking context and expertise, content by itself typically doesn’t help us navigate to an answer. Instead of going over a 20-page report with 10,000 excel lines, wouldn’t it be much easier to simply ask the author of the report? If our business is large or decentralized, how do we know whom to ask?
The solution is to connect the information we need to their creators such that experts lend their expertise to solve problems rather than create reports.
We learn something new, discover a new problem with our product, get an answer from a colleague, and then what? Save it on our desktop or our important email folder—or worse, it stays locked in our heads. Siloed information is not accessible to the rest of the company, which forces countless hours of duplicated work.
Ensuring that all worker information is stored centrally such that it is accessible by all of your co-workers enables businesses to tap into collective knowledge. By learning about the expertise of each employee, businesses can better map experts to workers with questions or problems.
Imagine you are going over the companies file system, only to find out that some of the documents are outdated, describing product schematics five versions and two years ago. Perhaps an updated version exists—somewhere—but it has a different name. Let’s face it: keeping files updated is a full time job and none of us are doing it.
It’s important to create a centralized location where workers can save information, easily upload new versions and update old ones.
Do you want to stop wasting time finding the information you need? Start leveraging the new wave of knowledge management like Senexx SolvePath and you too could start focusing on what’s important at work: getting work done.