Using Microsoft 365 as a knowledge platform
“Knowledge Management” as a modern concept originated in the 1970s with popular business thinkers considering how best to leverage organizational information and knowledge for competitive advantage. By the 1990s and 2000s, many books and academic papers had been published on the subject, consulting firms offered knowledge management services, and benchmarking organizations, like APQC, added their research to the global conversation.
Knowledge management draws from several related domains and disciplines including data and information management, information technology, theories of knowledge and adult learning, human resources, and social psychology.
In a simplistic form, knowledge management removes or reduces barriers for people to learn from data, information, and each other. And in the context of work, the reason for learning is to get the job done.
Knowledge Management in Plain English
Every organization and context are different and the specific barriers for knowledge sharing and learning differ, along with priorities for action. Across literature and published case studies, there are some common themes and opportunities that seem to apply to most organizations. And the evolution of Microsoft 365 (M365) provides knowledge platform capabilities that align well with those themes.
Make it easy to find who knows what and connect with them
Practically speaking, it’s impossible for people to capture all of what they know. And, often knowledge is buried in the subconscious until a trigger brings it to the surface, like a current situation or a question. So, every organization should spend some time thinking about how to make experience, talent and expertise visible and findable, and enable people to connect and learn from peers and share what they know in return.
M365 provides profile cards for users that have basic contact information, files accessed recently, peers and collaborators. With Viva Topics enabled, profiles are auto populated with topics that a user is connected to because they have authored, or edited content related to that topic. Profile cards can also be linked to LinkedIn accounts to provide more professional background information.
Viva Topics extends the utility of Profile Cards by connecting people to topics, and displaying experts on Topic Cards along with key documents, related topics and curated discussions and communities.
Currently, Microsoft Delve also provides a user-friendly way to access user profiles and recently accessed documents. The future of Delve is uncertain at this point and warrants following closely.
Support communities of interest or practice
In our complex world, no one person has all the answers. Collaboration is needed not just within organizational hierarchies, but across them. Communities, whether informal and spontaneous or intentional and organizationally supported, are an essential knowledge sharing and learning vehicle.
M365 provides several technology components to support communities. Use SharePoint site templates, customization options and web parts to create community spaces, online homes for employee resource groups, and collaboration sites. Setup Microsoft Teams spaces for teams and communities of all types using tabs and apps to improve the utility and user experience of the space.
Setup Yammer communities and link the spaces to SharePoint and other M365 content and resources. You can integrate Yammer communities and other Yammer services directly into Microsoft Teams with the Viva Engage application for Teams if you are looking to implement a “Microsoft Teams First “ user experience.
Learn more: Get a deeper look at knowledge sharing in Microsoft 365 in our recent webinar
Equip everyone to contribute
Knowledge sharing and learning is a reciprocal human social process supported by complimentary skills. Problem solving, decision making, critical and analytic thinking, and creativity are often associated with the learning process. They help people consume, make sense of, and internalize knowledge and information. Communication, collaboration, leadership, presentation, and facilitation skills help people share what they know effectively, creating the conditions for learning and working well with others.
Viva Learning can help organizations build and reinforce the skills and knowledge needed for knowledge sharing and learning. As a central learning hub integrated into the Microsoft Teams experience, you can make learning content, whether from 3rd party providers or developed “in-house,” available to individuals, specific teams, communities and across the organization. You can curate the content to focus on the most important learning content for your organization, and your experts and employees can recommend high value content as well.
Make information easy to create, capture, find and share
Content captured in some form or other is a core resource that everyone learns from. The quality and findability of content has a dramatic impact on productivity, and timeliness and quality of work output. Reducing the barriers to file, find and share information is a very common element of a knowledge strategy. Within the M365 and SharePoint environments, there are several practices that can reduce those barriers:
Have content stored where it can be accessed. For many organizations, valuable content is stored on network drives with inconstant folder structures, access permissions, naming conventions and metadata. In some organizations OneDrive is used extensively for content sharing and collaboration, which leaves access permissions up to the discretion of the individual, and, puts content at risk with employee departures. Within M365, important unstructured organizational content should be stored in SharePoint where it can be easily found and accessed, and appropriately managed a security and retention/disposition perspective.
Remove unnecessary content silos. Focusing the collaboration on and saving important content in SharePoint instead of One Drive and network drives helps, but another important element is adopting an open access model wherever possible is also an important practice. Some types of content should have very limited access, like employee files, research and development intellectual property, or information that if released could have serious injury to national interest. Otherwise, too many information silos make it too difficult to find information, creating more work, negatively impacting the learning process, and often triggers unnecessary re-creating of content. Open access models are also essential to get value from any technology investments in enterprise search, and AI driven applications like Viva Topics.
Use thoughtful flat information architecture and consistent metadata and tagging. Flat site architectures are a proven practice in SharePoint Online to improve navigation and user experience. Using content and document types in SharePoint consistently will improve metadata quality, findability and user experience. Defaulting and auto-generating metadata will reduce the user burden of providing metadata when documents are added to SharePoint.
Improve Microsoft Search and SharePoint search experience. Microsoft Search provides a number of features to help users find the content they are looking for across M365 and connected repositories. Search results pages can be customized with “verticals” to enable users to focus on specific types of content or sources, and options to filter and focus search results. Important results can be promoted with the use of Bookmarks or Q&A. Search in SharePoint Online incudes additional capabilities to improve search results and experience including customizable web parts that can be added to sites and libraries. The key is to extend search beyond “out of the box.”
Extend search to bridge content repositories. Invariably, important content is stored in a number of content repositories in organizations. Microsoft provides Graph connectors to enable Microsoft Search to extend to other data sources, including enterprise systems like ServiceNow, Confluence, Jira, SalesForce, Enterprise web sites and even network file shares. Microsoft also provides the tools to develop custom connectors if needed. In addition, 3rd party enterprise search tools are available in the marketplace such as Coveo, Elastic Search and Lucidworks.
Reduce redundant, obsolete and transitory content. The majority of content created in organizations is born digital, and a constant user challenge is finding quality and authoritative content among the duplicates, versions, convenience copies and storage locations. Generally, people searching inside an organization have a specific need to meet, outcome in mind, or are looking for a specific file(s) they think or know exists. Taking the time to identify and properly delete ROT, and use Microsoft Purview to tag and retain content of business value until it is no longer needed and then dispose of it helps users get to their search result faster, and increases confidence in the outcome.
Use Viva Topics in Microsoft Teams to connect people and content. As mentioned earlier, Viva Topics uses topic cards and pages to provide easy access to experts and content relevant to the topic. These topic cards and pages are accessible through hyperlinks that are available in Microsoft Teams, on SharePoint pages, and in Outlook, topic answers in search results, and in the topic center home page. Viva Topics uses Microsoft AI to identify topics relevant to your organization by scanning content in SharePoint and M365, and soon, in other repositories linked with Microsoft Graph connectors.
Keep everyone involved with technology change and evolution
Everyone is trying to manage their busy schedules and make room for what is important. People generally don’t like surprises that will have an unexpected impact on them, and technology is perpetually changing. Because people support what they help create, consider publishing a regularly updated roadmap of upcoming technology changes. Provide a vehicle for interested users to submit software and feature requests, and to vote on what interests them the most. Being explicit and informative about technology changes, and enabling users to participate in the process, will help your organization’s agility and comfort with change.
For example, Microsoft publishes its Microsoft 365 Roadmap covering its apps and cloud services, and is previewing a user Feedback Portal.
Continuously monitor and evolve
Since the world around us changes so frequently, it is important to constantly monitor how information is created and accessed, and how knowledge sharing and learning are taking place. It provides an opportunity to assess impacts, uncover hidden or emerging needs and inform continuous improvement. In M365, Microsoft captures and provides access to data of all types, including:
Activities in all 365 applications and services
Communications preferences
Use of SharePoint and OneDrive for files and documents
Storage in mailboxes, OneDrive and SharePoint
Audit logs
Microsoft also has a feedback link on search results pages to solicit feedback directly from users on their search experience.
Microsoft 365 data can be visualized using pre-defined templates in PowerBI, and using Gravity Union’s MOAT, which has the advantage of retaining audit trail data longer than the Microsoft defaults.
Don’t forget the people-side of knowledge
The thoughtful use of technology like Microsoft 365 is an enabler of knowledge sharing and learning, and of course people are at its core. Innovative technologies like Viva Learning, Viva Topics, Microsoft Search all require some form of thoughtful curation of relevant content and experience to ensure their usefulness within each organization. Facilitators are required to create the conditions and circumstances where individuals and groups can share what they know and learn from each other online and in person and help build sustainable tool kits and practices. Information Architects and Metadata Specialists are needed to ensure content is well organized and tagged and findable as a result.
Leaders need to reward and recognize knowledge-oriented practices and actions like contributing to knowledge bases, proactively reaching out to experts and others to learn before doing, and sharing experiences and lessons learned.
And finally, in our collective rush to deploy technology and communicate messages, it is very easy to forget the “receiver,” the learner. When thinking about a platform for knowledge sharing and learning, don’t forget to consider learner needs, which will drive their knowledge and learning actions; looking for relevant information and data (both internal and external), seeking out experts, and asking the questions to set a learning agenda and context. Conceive, design and implement your knowledge platform and associated roles and practices with the user in mind.
Learn more: Get a deeper look at knowledge sharing in Microsoft 365 in our recent webinar
Contact Gravity Union if you would like help using the right combination M365 technologies to help your organization create, capture and share information and knowledge.
More reading and references
Patton, S. (2022) The great reshuffle and how Microsoft Viva is helping reimagine the employee experience, Microsoft 365 Blog. Microsoft. Available at: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2021/09/28/the-great-reshuffle-and-how-microsoft-viva-is-helping-reimagine-the-employee-experience/ (Accessed: December 13, 2022).
Neglected Receiver of Knowledge Sharing, Ivey Business Journal. (2022). Retrieved 12 December 2022, from https://iveybusinessjournal.com/publication/neglected-receiver-of-knowledge-sharing/
Lau, Y. (2022). Council Post: Embrace Lifelong Learning To Thrive In The Future Of Work. Retrieved 12 December 2022, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeshumanresourcescouncil/2021/09/30/embrace-lifelong-learning-to-thrive-in-the-future-of-work/?sh=ec6216b7631c
Girard, J. A. L., & Barnes, S. (2018). Knowledge Management Matters: Words of Wisdom from Leading Practitioners. Van Haren Publishing.
A New Paradigm For Corporate Training: Learning In The Flow of Work. (2018). Retrieved 3 January 2023, from https://joshbersin.com/2018/06/a-new-paradigm-for-corporate-training-learning-in-the-flow-of-work/
O'Dell, C. S., Hubert, C. (2011). The new edge in knowledge how knowledge management is changing the way we do business. Wiley.
Spender, J.C. (2014) “Knowledge management: Origins, history, and development,” Advances in Knowledge Management, pp. 3–23. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09501-1_1.
Sullivan, M. (2016) Km: Definition, history, current trends , RealKM. RealKM Magazine. Available at: https://realkm.com/2016/07/19/km-definition-history-current-trends-personality-tkms-series-part-2/. (Accessed: November 23, 2022).
Stewart, Darin. (2021). A Sustainable Approach to Knowledge Management With Microsoft 365. Gartner, ID G00751285
Stewart, Darin. (2021) What Microsoft’s Viva Topics Means for Knowledge Management. Gartner, ID G00755877
Stewart, Darin. (2022) Checklist for Ensuring Hybrid Workers Can Always Find the Information They Need. Gartner. ID G00762074
Understanding Microsoft 365 Audit Logs — Gravity Union. (2022). Retrieved 14 December 2022, from https://www.gravityunion.com/blog/2021/1/microsoft-365-audit-logs
Rosencrance, L. (2022). How to choose an enterprise search platform. Retrieved 13 December 2022, from https://www.computerworld.com/article/3655951/how-to-choose-an-enterprise-search-platform.html
