Tech by LLM
Laura L Martin
Blog by LLM
The Impact of Poor KM
Ensuring One Source of Truth for your knowledge assets, to avoid negative impact in your business
The most important tenet of good knowledge/content management is One Source of Truth. With rare exception, never duplicate content. Leverage hyperlinking and other methods to access the definitive/always-most-recent version of destination content. This is true of all content, but especially for instructions, processes, procedures, and other critical information your employees need to perform their jobs at maximum efficiency and accuracy.
If important information changes, notify people via every available portal and communications channel available. This is an example of the second most important tenet of knowledge/content management: multipath navigation.
However, only links should be provided in those portals and communication channels. No duplication of data. All roads must lead to the definitive destination content for one source of truth.
Wherever the destination content resides (Confluence, Box, SharePoint, other), if you duplicate that content in communication channels (email, Teams, Slack, other), some people will remember that they saw that information in a communications channel, and go there for the content that was distributed to them in a static form.
You don't want people to be following a procedure which was documented in a static post they saw in email or a Teams chat three weeks or three months ago, because the procedure may have changed slightly or greatly since then. Even if an update chat post or email is sent out when the destination content changes, some users may miss that update, and continue to refer to the outdated information.
You always want users to go to the "living document" location for the one-source-of-truth destination content, and that destination content should always reside in a repository. Tools which function primarily as communications channels should not be used as knowledge repositories.
Users who complain about having to follow a link to instructional destination content from a communications channel - rather than seeing it right there in an email - do not understand the impact of having duplicate data floating around the company.
If your users are already viewing information in a content repository (rather than a communications channel), you may have other options than just links. It depends on your repository software. For example:
Confluence (repository and collaboration software from Atlassian) has a function called "Include Page" where you can embed an entire page that resides in another location. If you want users to follow instructions owned and maintained by another group, and you don't want them to have to click away from your Confluence space to go to another Confluence space for that information, use the Include Page macro (automation) to embed the instructions page in your space. This automation will "render" the instructions page from the other location so that it will look as if the content resides right there on a page in your space. If/when the instructions are updated by the other group, the rendered page on your space will automatically display those updates.
Out-of-date content can lead to errors in software coding, deployment, or other processes, which can lead to production failures, which can lead to a loss of time and internal dollars wasted, and a loss of revenue due to customers abandoning your products/services.
The impact of poor KM is real.
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