Learn why knowledge management is essential for start-ups, boosting efficiency and sustainable growth through structured information harnessing.
It is often perceived that knowledge management is something that large, matured firms need to deal with. Nothing, however, can be further from the truth. Knowledge Management (KM) is equally important for start-ups as it is for larger firms. Firms at various stages of maturity have their own unique reasons for managing knowledge effectively. While KM prevents organization silos from building up in mature organization, start-ups need to harness the power of information to structure their learning and channelize the energy and exuberance of early successes into a sustainable growth path.
An unproductive system
According to a survey by Mckinsey, an average employee across organizations spends approximately 20% of his / her working hours searching for documents or information. While mature firms with greater human resource strength may afford to operate occasionally with low employee productivity, leaner start-ups can ill afford such luxuries.
In an organization, time is wasted simply because information is not centralized and is not often searchable – which means it may be lying in an employee’s hard drive. Often information is not even documented or codified, and the firm has to make do with the nearest equivalent.
The solution of course is taking baby steps towards building a centralized knowledge library. This is much less daunting as it sounds. While it may appear like investing thousands of euros into building an advanced tech product, it doesn’t need to be so.
“An average organization expects employees to remember every detail but a smart organization expects employees to know where to look for knowledge.” – Sudeshna Das, Founder, Avahita
What’s in it for start-ups?
A start-up can embark on its KM journey with a simple application which can streamline storage, management, and retrieval of relevant knowledge and information when and where it is required. This type of a system ensures the right documents and therefore information is always accessible to employees at a click of a button. While salespeople can gain access to relevant past proposals to reduce effort and time required to draft a fresh proposal, project delivery personnel can look to reuse existing knowledge documents to increase efficiency in delivery.
Institutionalizing knowledge management can have other positive consequences for a start-up as well. In order to develop the backend architecture of the system, it forces leadership to chart out service lines, Business Units, clearly lay out topic areas of importance, standardize roles and designations. This level of standardization and documentation enables start-ups to chart a more structured growth path and prepares it well for the future.