Chang Zi Qian, Co-Founder, and team, at Singapore-based legal knowledge company, Intelllex.“…A law firm’s most valuable assets are its clients, lawyers and knowledge. Of these, knowledge is arguably the least well managed. This can be partially attributed to the perception that knowledge is intangible. Its intangibility obfuscates its management, which in turn impinges on firms’ ability to measure the business impact of effective Knowledge Management (KM). In an earlier post, we established the importance of filtering information to extract for knowledge. In this post, we hope to add clarity on how to manage knowledge, and how to achieve success in implementing an effective KM strategy.

Right knowledge. Right person. Right time.

Having ploughed through volumes of literature on this topic, our distilled definition of KM is:making the right knowledge available to the right person when they need it. The devil is in the detail, and we will cover this in more depth over our next few posts. Expanding on this understanding, we can see that effective KM must therefore cover a few activities:

• Consolidating explicit knowledgeand documenting tacit knowledge(e.g. consolidating the ideas expressed in the volumes of work into this article)
• Developing an organizational memory and providing access to it with appropriate retrieval facilities (e.g. posting this article on Medium, rather than leaving it in my personal computer)
• Facilitating the re-use of existing knowledge according to the different needsof knowledge reusers (e.g. applying the appropriate tags to this article so it can be better discovered)
• Identifying the right knowledge worker to share the appropriate knowledge, either by way of push or pull…”