Each company continually gathers and elicits unstructured information – but once you have it how should you manage it?

Information Management is a discipline that treats information as an asset and manages that asset similarly to other company assets such as your people or your company finances. A sub-discipline of Information Management is Knowledge Management which is the process of creating, sharing, using and managing the knowledge a company holds.

Knowledge is also often referred to as either Explicit or Tacit:

• Explicit Knowledge – is the know-what, that can be effectively captured with documentation
• Tacit Knowledge – is the know-how, which is often hard to capture as it is usually in people’s heads

Knowledge Management provides your team with a structured way to discover, share and collaborate information, furthering a company’s decision-making abilities. Although eliciting and storing information is important, the real win is when your team can easily find and in turn use that information.

Some of the benefits of building Knowledge Management into an employee’s usual daily work, include:

• Easier training and onboarding processes
• Improve efficiency
• Enhanced staff collaboration
• Improved employee morale through valuing knowledge, training and innovation

Document Management provides your team with a systematic approach to manage documents, often controlled using Document Management systems. Documents, both hard copy and more often electronically, are received and created on a continual basis. These types of systems provide the capability to store, find and review documents.

Some of the benefits of implementing Document Management software in your company are to:

• Automate processes with workflows to manage the entire document lifecycle
• Provide different securities and permission levels
• Apply metadata to categorise documents for searchability
• Improve productivity by being able to easily locate correct document revisions and versions

Companies with a high document management maturity level will also implement Document Control capabilities. The point of difference being that Document Control is a profession (not a system) with the responsibility it is to administer controlled processes and practices for the creation, review, modification, issuance, distribution, accessibility and disposal of documents.

Document Controllers are often the conduit between project teams and external contractors ensuring compliance with the company and project’s document control procedures, especially with technical documents that a project depends on to provide a complete set of deliverables and realise project objectives.

Core Project Advisory has a team with expertise in Knowledge Management, Document Management and Document Control. Our team has been responsible for the implementation of knowledge and document management systems within organisations who have a complex building and infrastructure asset portfolio. We are familiar with several proprietary document management solutions and provide document control services for our clients. Please contact us to find out how we can assist with your Knowledge Management, Document Management and Document Control needs.