Knowledge management is a concept uniquely suited to discussions of agency capability-building. It leverages the collection of individual employee expertise to enhance organizational capability by creating, acquiring and transferring knowledge. It formalizes adaptation of the existing knowledge base as a result of new insights, thereby creating a feedback loop to continue improving the basis for informed decision making.
Done well, knowledge management offers a repeatable, proven way to conduct business and meet customer needs that takes into account historical context, experiences and lessons learned.
Other organizational benefits of knowledge management include:
- Synthesizing knowledge that once existed as pieces of data in several IT systems,
- Improving collaboration by providing a single source of information for multiple business areas to use, and
- Improving productivity by mitigating the need to find answers for the same questions repeatedly over time.