The knowledge needed to keep any company running from day to day is held in its people, systems and procedures and is infinitely valuable. However, retaining too much knowledge can rack up unnecessary costs. 

Whether your organisation is in the business of creating knowledge or managing information and whether or not its core knowledge and information changes often or barely at all, it remains a basic necessity to protect it and for it to be easily accessible. 

One of the major risks facing any organisation is the amount of knowledge that exists solely in the in the minds of its people. This knowledge can be lost whenever people leave the organisation. It is vital to manage your organisation’s intellectual property (IP). 

Therefore, it is a valuable exercise to assess your organisation’s knowledge management requirements and adjust your approach to knowledge management accordingly. 

The following aspects bear consideration: 

Static, new (innovative) and historical knowledge 

There are many different types of knowledge, but these three exist in most organisations.  

1. Static knowledge 

Every organisation has some information that does not change all that often or all that much. Some examples are: 

• Data in systems (HR, finance, procurement, sales) 

• Business processes 

• Templates 

• Letterheads 

• Forms 

• Receipts 

• Presentations 

• Spreadsheets 

• Reports 

• Business requirements 

• Architecture designs 

• Test cases 

• Training material 

• Systems documentation 

•  

2. New (innovative) knowledge 

The creation of new knowledge is a key capability underpinning business evolution. In essence, knowledge creation is a product and the challenges inherent in managing this knowledge over time make a knowledge repository a critical success factor. 

It is critical because it is difficult to maintain a balance between retaining too much and too little knowledge, dealing with misinformation, and the skewing of knowledge creation and retention by the race to stay competitive, which is often influence by backend algorithms that steer organisations towards conclusions that may not be aligned with their goals. 

3. Historical knowledge 

Once an organisation’s most recent latest change iteration has been concluded, its old static knowledge has been replaced with new innovative knowledge. The old static knowledge therefore becomes historical knowledge. Although much of this knowledge may be obsolete, not all of it will be. The value of knowledge needs to be interrogated before decisions about its retention are made. 

The following factors need to be borne in mind: 

Knowledge takes up storage, and backups of knowledge do too. Your organisation needs to decide what its appetite for storage capacity needs to be. 

• The impact of retained knowledge on your search results is important. These can be cluttered with old, irrelevant knowledge, which should rather be regularly pruned. When your people do a search, they should be able to have confidence in the relevance of the results. 

• If your knowledge is stored in the cloud, the volume of knowledge you retain has an impact on your network traffic. The cost of using internet bandwidth can add up.