What is Knowledge Management?
Knowledge Management is about Capturing, Creating, Distilling, Sharing and Using know-how. It’s about communities keeping the information, knowledge and experience alive by sharing what they know, building on it and adapting to their own use.
What is Knowledge?
You can think of a knowledgebase as a snowball. You, yourself, are a snowball. You’re rolling down a hill full of snow; the further you roll, the more snow will stick to you.
Sure, snow will also fall off you, and you’ll forget things often, but that’s just part of the process. Don’t be scared if you get to a project and you feel like you haven’t retained or memorized anything.
That’s natural and happens to everyone. The information will come back to you as you start solving your problems one at a time, relying on Google and your work Community for help, great knowledge is sticky.
Tools to Capture & Augment Information Management
Confluence – A web-based corporate wiki developed by Aussie software company Atlassian
What is Confluence?
- A wiki environment for creating rich content in one place
- A collaborative project workspace to create and share information
- A secure cloud location accessible from any device
- Ensures consistency in content presentation
- Confluence harvests knowledge by capturing knowledge and conversations as “a side effect of work”
- Confluence allows doing more with less by facilitating collaboration and information flow
- If you have a question or problem – first ask Confluence, if it doesn’t have the answer find out then share it for the next person!
Why use Confluence in your organisation?
- Reduce back-and-forth in emails finding information
- Speed up access to knowledge and information
- Promote innovation and cultural change
- Improve decision making processes
- Improve the efficiency of business operations and processes
- Integrates with existing applications/platforms such as Jira, Slack, Teams
- Importantly – if an employee leaves the organisation, there is a knowledge gap that is lost. Confluence retains this.
Documentation Structure
Many organisations do not have a good strategy for their knowledge and data management, and thus many disconnected data silo’s lacking a single source of truth emerge:
Whether it be Confluence, Sharepoint, Notion or one of many other tools out there, having a structured knowledge management and data architecture will vastly improve both knowledge capturing and retrieval processes, as well as overall data quality.
Outside of capturing work documentation, I personally also use Confluence on a day to day basis to capture any knowledge, tips and tricks or useful information I think might be helpful for every avenue in my life even outside of data analysis and software design.
We live in a data driven world which is unprecedented for humans up until this point, so leaning on a technology as a “second brain” allows me to quickly refer back to my notes whenever I encounter a problem I’ve solved in the past.
I use Confluence to capture all kinds of knowledge like travel itineraries, cooking recipes, fitness goals, finances, hobbies, productivity tools and much more, on top of notes I’ve learned from personal learning paths in Engineering, Maths, Programming, Data Analysis, Machine Learning, etc. as it is a free way to keep all my data organised in a single repository, accessible from any device at any time and secured with Two-Factor Authentication.