The Case for Knowledge Management

“Where’s the program management presentation for that client?”

“I don’t think we have one.”

“We do, Henrietta referenced it just last week.”

“Well I don’t know, maybe Georgette knows.”

“She’s on vacation.”

“Have you asked Rahn?”

“Didn’t you hear? He just resigned and his last day was Thursday.”

Sound familiar? How much time do employees waste tracking down information? Surely the problem can’t be that big.

Think again. According to Bloomfire’s Value of Enterprise Intelligence 2025 report, employees spend an average of 21% of their time searching for knowledge and another 14% recreating information they couldn’t find. This drag on productivity costs businesses and average of 25% of annual revenue.

Knowledge Management to the rescue.

I am constantly baffled by the number of people who have never even heard of this, let alone have the faintest idea what it is. When I explain its importance, the response I typically receive is some form of “oh, WE definitely need that at my company” or “hmm, that seems incredibly useful.”

How do “knowledge workers”, those who work in the field of knowledge management (KM), define KM? Getting the right information to the right person at the right time. One of our major goals is ensuring that people have easy access to accurate, up-to-date information and knowledge. This creates more productive work environments, and gives staff a single source of truth they can trust as being factually accurate.

Many people I talk to use or have at least heard of a knowledge base. But a knowledge base is not knowledge management. A knowledge base on its own can be useful, when it is managed properly. It must be governed, kept up-to-date and accurate, and easy to navigate. Without oversight, it becomes a useless cloud covered in wifi dust bunnies.

There are plenty of theories on why the Knowledge Management industry has not garnered a prime C-suite functionality in many organizations. I believe the primary reason for this is that we have not done a good job at selling its benefits. We are not making the case for KM, and executives do not understand the enormous cost of not having a solid knowledge management program.

Who needs KM?

I believe that every organization, no matter the size, can benefit from a proper knowledge management program. Every organization has information needed for it to simply exist. Most of the time this knowledge lives inside people’s heads. Tacit knowledge is difficult to extract or articulate. It can be hard to convey to others.

There are all kinds of reasons for staff to leave organizations: Retirement, quitting, being laid, or fired.

How many times have you heard something like “I don’t know what we would do if Claire ever left us; we would be lost.”

And how many times has “Claire” left?

Then the company must search through her files, looking for documents that may not even exist. The employees left behind must start from scratch, reinvent the wheel, and waste time. Time, one of our greatest resources, could be saved by having a properly governed knowledge management program.

Put a number on it. If Claire’s team of ten people are each losing the same 21% of a 40-hour week to searching for what she used to just know, that’s roughly eight hours a week per person, or about 84 hours a week across the team. Gone before anyone’s done any of the work they were hired to do. Over the course of a year, this becomes expensive, fast.

How common is it for employees to spend time creating content, and not realize someone in another department, or perhaps even on their own team, has already written it? What a waste. This is where that 14% “recreating information” comes from. From an employees spending hours rebuilding a document or process that already existed somewhere in the organization, because no one could find it.

Many companies have policies in place, for when they know an employee is exiting. When they have advance warning, for instance when someone retires, they are able to think strategically about what needs to happen. They can conduct interviews for the employee to share where they stored their documents and files, and how it was organized. If the company doesn’t have a formal KM program in place, they can do their best to get this information before the person leaves. This practice is called knowledge harvesting. It’s different from simply asking someone to clean out their desk.

But even in this scenario, the company may have wasted the content that person had created or used. It’s very possible they were sitting on documentation that could have helped departments beyond their own.

Thanks, in part to AI, KM has once again entered the chat.

Lots of organizations are adopting AI tools. And they can be incredibly helpful for improving workflows and increasing productivity. One unintended outcome of AI is that it’s showing organizations how their outdated and inaccurate institutional knowledge is failing them. Sure, you can deploy AI to crawl databases and serve up information. But if the information is out of date, how helpful is that AI agent?

This is precisely why KM struggles to get funded even now, when the case for it has never been stronger.

As I said earlier, the industry’s biggest problem isn’t the value of the work, it’s how poorly we’ve sold it.

How can we convince the C-suite that they are losing money by not investing in KM?

This is where ROI is key. We must show our impact using measurable outcomes. Examples of metrics are shorter onboarding times, reduced time to market, and increased speed in innovation.

Gaps in knowledge come at an expensive cost. The stats mentioned earlier show why. Every time someone cannot find the information they need, when they cannot trust the content is accurate and up-to-date translates directly into wasted time and wasted money. This can show up like Claire’s team losing 84 hours each week.

Securing a sponsor, funding and a team is not the finish line for a KM strategy. It’s the starting point. Because this work can take years to show ROI, we must keep tracking and communicating the improvements it drives, year after year.

Showcasing quick wins early

Any new initiative must prove it’s worthy of the resources it needs to run. This is why both having and showcasing quick wins at the beginning of a knowledge management program is crucial.

Quick wins are knowledge-intensive activities with tangible results achieved within three months of the induction of a program. They do not require an additional budget. Quick wins show that progress is possible and build credibility. They provide early recognition and buy-in for KM programs. They also demonstrate the effectiveness of the program to stakeholders. Quick wins help to silence skeptics and motivate teams to keep pushing forward with momentum.

Interested in learning about how a knowledge management strategy could help your team make this case internally? I’d love to share my insights with you. Send me a message or connect with me on LinkedIn.