Creating a knowledge management portal is one of the most effective ways to support your teams and ensure that business knowledge is always at the forefront of business operations.
But not all knowledge management portal tools are created equal, and using the wrong tool can stop your knowledge management initiatives before they even start.
In this article, we'll cover everything you need to know when choosing a knowledge management portal.
Let's start from the beginning.
What is a knowledge management portal?
A knowledge management portal (or KM portal) is a digital platform that houses an organization's collective knowledge and makes it accessible to all team members and stakeholders as needed.
In short, an organization's knowledge management portal is its only source of information. Here, team members and other interested parties can find documentation on:
- standard flowand workflows
- software documentation,Technical documentation,process documentation, and other internal documentation on company best practices
- Police Company
- Team contact details
- Legal and technical documents
Basically, a knowledge management portal should contain all the information an employee needs to do their job well.
Obviously, the knowledge management portal concept is not entirely new. In fact, companies have been using them in some form since at least the 1990s, when the Internet became "mainstream".
But only recently have teams started using knowledge management portals for more than just storing information. The modern knowledge management portal is a digital place where active learning and knowledge sharing almost always takes place.
In this context, it should be clear:
Creating a knowledge management portal is critical to managing your organization's knowledge to enhance your team's professional growth and your organization's success.
Benefits of creating a knowledge management portal
Let's take a look at some of the more specific benefits of creating a knowledge management portal.
(A quick note: these benefits apply to all knowledge portals, even the most basic ones. That is, as long as the information presented in them is accurate, complete, and complete.)
Improved team productivity
Creating a knowledge management portal will make your employees more productive, period.
On the one hand, quick and easy access to important information allows them to work efficiently. However, without this one Source of Truth:
- 49% of employeesHaving trouble finding required files and information
- 43% have trouble sharing documents and other data
- 33% have difficulty finding the most up-to-date information or files.
Access to proven best practices, demo videos and other educational content will also improve employee efficiency. Over time, you'll hone this content even further, making it even more important to your team's overall efforts.
Improved customer retention
A knowledge management portal can ensure that your customer-facing teams are successful in all interactions with your audiences.
For example, your marketing and sales teams have instant access to a wealth of information, such as:
- Individual customer profiles and interaction histories.
- Product specifications and comparisons
- Sales copy, scripts and promotional offers
Armed with this information, they can easily guide their current and potential customers to their next purchase.
Your service and support teams also have access to a wealth of information (eg product and workflow instructions, FAQs, troubleshooting data, etc.) to help them provide better customer service.
Again, mix one-piece efficiency and one-piece effectiveness and you have a recipe for successful customer retention.
Improved team roster
With all of your organizational knowledge in one place, it makes it easier for your people and teams to stay on track over time.
Every day, the collaborating teams and departments have access to information and the current progress of the project. In return, everyone involved knows what they are responsible for during the completion of the project.
If you think of the "big picture", your employees always have free access to your company's vision and mission statements and other supporting documents. A company-wide focus on knowledge management will also help keep your team members aligned and moving towards a common overall goal.
Continuous Workflow Improvements
We've covered that, but let's be clear:
When your team's processes and workflows are presented so clearly, it becomes much easier to make meaningful improvements to those processes.
For any task, your teams can identify:
- What works well (and what doesn't)
- How specific employees or teams can work together to be more productive
- What employees need to know to truly optimize their efforts (and the outcome of those efforts).
Therefore, a comprehensive knowledge management portal can set your team up for continued growth, both individually and across the enterprise.
Why Basic Knowledge Management Portal solutions are not enough
when you just received yourknowledge management initiativesFrom scratch, you might consider using a simpler wiki-style solution for your KM portal.
The thing is, it's so easyKnowledge Management Solutionsyou'll only get your knowledge management efforts so far. To be honest, the many drawbacks of these basic tools make them a less than ideal option for anyone looking to improve their knowledge management efforts.
difficulty of use
In general, the wiki-style KM portal tools are not the most user-friendly options available.
This is especially true for non-technical teams. In many cases, knowledge of HTML is required to successfully create and format knowledge documents on these portals. While coding skills aren't required, the user interface tends to be a bit more complex and generally not aimed at the non-technical.
This all goes hand in hand with the open source, "what you see is what you get" nature of these basic solutions. While they can be modified to make them easier to use, you need a team of tech-savvy people to make that happen.
A "blank canvas"
Wiki-style knowledge management platforms sometimes offer very little structure and guidance.
As shown above, you pretty much have a blank slate to build individual knowledge resources and connect those resources into a cohesive knowledge management platform.
That... might not be a good thing.
For one thing, it can result in confusion when creating knowledge content from scratch. Without templates to work from (or even just use for inspiration), the content your various teams create lacks the consistent look and structure needed to maximizeknowledge transferto apprentices
Your team will also not have much guidance when it comes to building a structured and cohesive knowledge network. While it's not impossible to create this framework yourself, it's just one more task for your team to get knowledge management up and running.
Finally, the presentation of this knowledge is again based solely on the technical skills of your team. If all they can create is basic text-based content, they'll see everything when they access that knowledge in the future.
Poor access to knowledge.
Wiki-style KB portals are also generally quite bland, which can sometimes make accessing the right knowledge content difficult.
While basic portal tools likely have some form of search functionality, they are generally not as sophisticated. In many cases, students still have to navigate a sea of irrelevant search results to find the information they are looking for.
Likewise, the tool's content tagging feature can also be quite rudimentary. Again, this can make it difficult for students to find relevant knowledge content, especially those who are just browsing and may not know exactly what they are looking for.
Lack of collaboration features
However, more modern wiki-style KB portals offer more collaboration features than in earlier days. It can still be hit or miss.
Really, anything short of true real-time remote collaboration is obsolete and will hold your team back from making big strides in your knowledge management initiative.
Yes, individual members of your team can add, edit and enhance knowledge content as needed. And they likely have other collaboration tools available to use in conjunction with the portal.
Still, it would be much better to have all this in one complete tool, wouldn't it?
rudimentary analysis
Improving your knowledge content is an important part of knowledge management.
Unfortunately, basic KB portals also provide basic reporting and analytics for your team to work on. Typically, you don't get a lot of insight into how your team is using their knowledge, how it's impacting their work, or how your KM initiative has impacted your company's bottom line.
While you may be able to get some guidance in this regard, your team will likely have to do a lot more legwork when evaluating your knowledge management efforts.
Why knowledge base software is crucial to powering your knowledge management portal
In general, the simplest wiki-style KM tools cause one of two problems:
They are too difficult or require too many resources to work with. It may be impossible for non-technical teams to make progress on this front. And even tech-savvy teams must invest a lot of time and energy into their knowledge management efforts.
So the solution is to opt for a more robust and advanced one.knowledge base softwareSolution.
it is becauseCreating a knowledge baseis the best choice for your knowledge portal.
Knowledge base tools are easy to use
Modern knowledge base tools are developed with experienced and non-tech-savvy users alike.
When creating and editing documents, users are provided with a user-friendly interface, comparable to Google Docs and other popular content creation tools.
This, along with drag-and-drop capabilities, document templates, and tags, allows teams to quickly create knowledge content and easily modify it to their liking.
Tech-savvy teams can also search their Knowledge Portal HTML files for more customization options:
Additionally, SaaS-based knowledge management solutions offer a high level of customer service and support, including automated and convenient onboarding experiences for new users.
With this guidance, support, and support constantly available, you'll always be in a position to steer your team's knowledge management in the right direction.
Knowledge base tools drive teams to standardize
This additional guidance also makes it easier to standardize knowledge management processes across the organization.
In fact, tools like Helpjuice guide new users through the process of creating, publishing, and sharing their first knowledge piece.
Content templates ensure that knowledge creators follow certain rules and regulations when developing specific content. All knowledge bases, in turn, maintain a consistent structure and a consistent look and feel, regardless of who created them.
Structuring knowledge is also more intuitive in today's modern knowledge base tools. For example, with Helpjuice's content tagging and categorization features, you can create a network of content knowledge without having to manually link related assets.
All of this, in turn, will allow students to have a more strategic and targeted approach when interacting with their knowledge content. The more familiar and intuitive the user experience, the easier it will be to utilize the knowledge stored in your portal.
Knowledge base tools streamline access to knowledge
In addition, modern knowledge base tools allow team members to take full control of their learning and development.
For one thing, the search capability of the advanced knowledge base tools far exceeds simple water solutions. Examples of Helpjuice's search features include:
- Dynamic and relevant results based on exact query matches and contextual tracking
- Crawl PDFs, other text-based files, and text in images
- Filter search by category
Again, a more logically structured knowledge network means that students always know where to look when looking for specific information. From there, they can complement their learning with related content, which they can access directly from the portal pages they have already visited.
Helpjuice's Swifty plugin actually automates the process of suggesting additional reading for users, creating additional learning opportunities at key moments for individual students.
Likewise, like many other modern knowledge base tools, Helpjuice integrates with other tools through which organizational knowledge is freely shared.
By connecting your single source of truth to the rest of your technology stack, your knowledge content becomes accessible to all team members, at any time, through virtually any channel.
Knowledge base tools enable real-time multi-channel collaboration
Team collaboration is an essential part of a successful knowledge management initiative.
So it makes sense that today's best knowledge base tools are very focused on achieving this.
With Helpjuice, team members and other stakeholders can comment, annotate and edit knowledge content together and simultaneously. As we said before, this is non-negotiable.Telework will continue to normalize.
Collaborating teams also have access to previous versions of knowledge bases and other important documentation.
This ensures that everyone involved is up to date on progress or changes to these documents and can collaborate effectively at all times, whether in real time or not.
Once again, integrations come into play, allowing teams to access and leverage knowledge content while collaborating across other channels and platforms.
For example, Helpjuice integrates with:
- Salesforce, which allows customer service teams to access knowledge base content through the sales platform
- Freshdesk for customer service teams to meetKnowledge Base Articleto customers directly in technical support tickets
- Cabinet, where teams can quickly and easily share knowledge base articles for a variety of purposes
With so many ways to collaborate, creating, sharing, and enhancing knowledge will quickly become a natural part of your team's work.
Knowledge base tools provide advanced analysis and "meta" capabilities.
Your team's knowledge content – and your overall approach to knowledge management – must be constantly evolving.
But to make improvements that really matter, your efforts must be data-driven. Some important dates to consider here are:
- Which knowledge resources and content topics are most frequently accessed by your teams
- Which search terms are used most often and which questions are asked most often
- What knowledge content has been updated recently (or not).
It's also important to understand how your knowledge management portal (and general knowledge management initiatives) impacted your team, your customers, and your organization. Here you will see data that illustrate your team's productivity levels and how your KM portal has led to better results for your team.
When it comes to performance analysis and the like, knowledge base tools trump wiki-style KM portals in general.
With this data in hand, your team can make targeted improvements to your knowledge content and your knowledge management processes as a whole.
Knowledge Management Portals: What's the Bottom Line?
Okay, the verdict is probably pretty clear by now:
Undoubtedly, modern knowledge base software is the best choice for teams that want to create a comprehensive, cohesive and easy-to-use knowledge management portal.
Is there an easier solution?
Sure... but it's going to take a lot more work to make that happen. And, as we've discussed before, your team may simply not have the technical expertise or breadth to really go down this path.
So it's best to invest in a fully functional knowledge base tool from the start rather than wasting time trying a solution that doesn't do much for your team.
Ready to get started? sign up for oneHelpjuice 14-day free trial today.