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Internal knowledge sharing - is it the base of the company brain? |
balazskeszei |
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Why is it important to document information? The answer is fairly simple: documented company knowledge is easily transmitted, multiplied or updated, and it can be stored securely.
Yet, many people still think that the constant documenting slows down creative work, thus decreases productivity. This is however a mistaken thought and as such it does not show forward thinking.
From the 80’s flexibility and innovation are the building blocks of companies. It is especially true for small and medium-sized businesses as in these areas they can be competitive with multinational corporations with million dollar budgets. The basis of innovation is the development of 'traditional knowledge', the striving to acquire and distribute 'new knowledge'. Reaching this is impossible without appropriate company content handling.
Organizing and managing ever-growing structured and unstructured data and transfer of corporate knowledge is impossible, if the important information, the software used by the company and the colleagues themselves are not connected.
Knowledge, that is useful from the viewpoint of innovative processes, can come from several sources. Information necessary for operation is usually provided by the leadership. The company can however get valuable knowledge from its consumers, employees or from information derived from the behavior of the competition.
Imagine a complex process with several participants. The main goal is processing large amount of information and documents, storing and distributing them securely long-term. A system that makes it easy to prepare and retrieve statistics compiled from the stored information that are essential for making decisions. What you imagined is enterprise content management (ECM) and it is the skeleton of companies' digital workplaces.
Believe it or not, the key to the secret is not the software, but its integration considering business processes and objectives. The real question is: how the appropriate information is going to reach predetermined decision points? How difficult it is to retrieve a certain document in case of an inspection? How can new colleagues access several years of knowledge? The format of the material you work with does not matter. Whether it is an electronic document, paper-based document, letter, email, fax, some kind of multimedia content, text or chat message, it can be integrated into one system. ECM solutions handle different datatypes easily as they are equipped with the properties of several applications and file managers.
Your only task is to assign employees to different authorities, lists or libraries and they can easily access knowledge relevant to them.
In most companies - probably in yours as well - archiving and organizing documents is one of the biggest problems. In our example sensenet handles problems related to storing, security settings, title management, version control, software integration, sharing and formatting at the same time. The data stored this way can also be retrieved easily thanks to the metadata indexing capabilities.
This is how a unified content management system brings out the most of the digital working environment:
- Version control: preserving different versions of a document and retrieving an earlier version in case of an error;
- Office integration: documents in sensenet document libraries can be edited directly in Microsoft Office as well;
- "Shared drive replacement": it is like opening a drive, the libraries in the content repository can be accessed from any kind of file manager (e.g. Windows Explorer or Total Commander) – you don't need to open them in the browser;
- Document library title management: you can assign work processes to lists and libraries and you can assign users with different permissions to them;
- Check-in / check-out function: no more data loss while you are working on a draft.
There are different kinds of content management systems you can choose from. Do it wisely, because it will dramatically influence your digital experience in the short run 🙂
If you have more questions about sensenet, do not hesitate to contact us, we will be happy to answer your questions!