Imagine the power of your company and how much more productive each of your employees would be if every employee could leverage the collective knowledge of everybody else. This collective knowledge would stay with your company, and you’d be able to continually update it even if individuals left. I’m talking about knowledge and skills that are relevant to your business.

Unless you have a way of making available the relevant knowledge people need to do their jobs where, when, and how they need it, your company’s ability to fully benefit from continuous improvement is incomplete. This is where knowledge management becomes relevant.

Relevance to business excellence

During the late 1990s, a large group of companies where I worked had a business excellence model similar to the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program. In 2000, we added criteria related to knowledge management to the group’s business excellence model. (Interestingly, a few years later, the Baldridge Criteria were also amended to include knowledge management.)

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