Knowledge Management is about capture, create, store, retrieval and sharing of information across the organization. This involves maintenance of a central repository of information and/or knowledge portal where proprietary and specific information about the company is stored. This information is related to the organization’s processes, knowledge, best practices, lessons learned, capabilities and so on.
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Updated By Cuspera
Last updated: Sep 27, 2024
Confluence - Team Collaboration Software | Atlassian
Confluence is a workspace collaboration software that helps in project collaboration, knowledge management thereby aiding in employee engagement and team work.
This tool can be used by different functions - developers, HR, sales and marketing and any function that needs collaborative tool. Confluence provides support for various artifacts for collaboration - meeting notes, policy documents, product requirements and marketing plans to name a few with associated templates. It helps in keeping the work artifacts organized with search ability to look for content easily.
It supports collaborative review with ability to give feedback inline with comments.
Confluence became the single-source of truth for client facing teams and helped them deliver on promises to the customer.Terrence Caldwell
Product Marketing Manager
Blend
Vendor: Atlassian US, Inc
Company Size: 1001-5000
HQ Location: Level 6/341 George St, Sydney, NSW 2000, AU
Financials: PRIVATE
App designed for note taking, organizing, task management, and archiving
Evernote is a note taking application that helps keep information organized and handy with capability to include text, images, audio, scans, PDFs, and documents to the notes. It supports customized formatting and helps sync up easily with other tools.
Evernote helps create a clutterless environment by reducing need for hard copies, economizing on storage space and enabling back-up copies in addition to allowing shared access. It allows saving of web pages without the ads, and marking up and highlighting text, and recognising handwritten notes.
Evernote’s Spaces feature provides for collecting and organizing team ideas, which can be shared and forwarded further for converting ideas into action. The templates feature helps organize notes quickly, saving time and effort, and is made customizable and reusable .
Evernote is a powerful tool that can help executives, entrepreneurs and creative people capture and arrange their ideas. All you have to do is use it.Forbes
Vendor: Evernote Corporation
Founded: 2000
Company Size: 251-500
HQ Location: Evernote Corporation, 305 Walnut Street, Redwood City, CA 94063, United States
Financials: SERIES E
Guru - Knowledge management software for the future of work
Get Guru is a real-time knowledge management solution for sales, marketing, support team, and could be deployed across the entire organization to have collective intelligence on the top areas to prioritize and focus work upon
It is primarily used to share information to team / cross functional members, which helps in bias to action and prioritization of key tasks internally, made available on channels such as website, collection & boards, collaborative tools such as Slack, browser integrations etc.
Get Guru is powered by Artificial Intelligence, Chatbots and Analytics with custom-triggers to provide real-time insights to all users on basis of collective intelligence
We are huge users of Slack on the Greenhouse sales team. Internal sales conversations happen here all daylong. Having Guru + Slack ensures our sales reps have a highly streamlined workflow with Guru ensuring all our sales knowledge lives right where sales conversations are taking place!Victoria Moss
Director of Sales Operations
Greenhouse
Vendor: Guru
Company Size: 11-50
HQ Location: 121 S Broad St, Floor 11, Philadelphia, PA
Financials: SERIES C
Best in Class Knowledge Sharing Platform
Bloomfire is a knowledge sharing platform to create one secure, searchable and easily accessible platform. The solution helps eradicate information silos by allowing the teams to securely share content with their peers.
The platform primarily offers Knowledge management, content organization and management, AI-powered search, Community-powered Q&A, content organization, Email and in-app notifications, Multimedia content sharing, Role-based management, content moderation, Publishing and Engagement features, Salesforce and Google Apps integration, Unlimited groups and sub-communities.
The AI powered search deep indexes every word and creates automatic tags. The platform gives users the flexibility to create impactful content by using rich media like images, videos etc. Every post gives users the option to comment, ask questions or share answers, like, share and follow.
When we switched over to Bloomfire, within a few weeks we were getting feedback that it was saving employees 20-30 minutes a day looking for information.Diana Powell
Go-To-Market Manager
Conagra
Vendor: Bloomfire, Inc.
Founded: 2010
Company Size: 11-50
HQ Location: 1717 W. 6th Street, #100 Austin, TX 78703
Financials: SERIES B
Transform communications and culture with modern intranet software
Simpplr is an Intranet software built for employee collaboration and aligning distributed work-force. It helps drive employee engagement, improve employee productivity, ramps up new-hire onboarding and creates a Virtual headquarters for the employee community.
It provides multichannel access, is built to scale and easy to deploy even in large enterprises.
Simpplr is built to develop networks across departments and locations. It provides adaptive personalization and AI-backed content recommendations. Its interactive employee directory allows for easy interaction with co-workers and the profile information helps drive engagement.
Simpplr’s Smart Feed feature also helps everyone stay well-informed with must-reads, socialize with coworkers, follow team activities and participate in virtual celebrations. It allows secured access and sharing of all types of files, enables photo and video hosting and more such collaboration features.
I can't imagine how we would have handled the COVID-19 pandemic without a centralized communication platform. Our intranet, The Lens, has been extremely effective in communicating important safety information and provides a vital connection point for our remote workforce.Mac Curtis
Chairman and CEO
Perspecta
Vendor: Simpplr, Inc
Founded: 2014
Company Size: 51-100
HQ Location: 100 Marine Pkwy, Suite 250, Redwood City, CA 94065
Financials: SERIES D
Notion The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and ...
Notion is a collaborative document editor where one can write, plan, collaborate and organize content. It is suited for businesses looking for real-time collaboration tools to increase productivity.
It features tools such as Notes & Docs, knowledge base, tasks & projects, spreadsheets and Databases. It offers slash commands, drag & drop editor and real-time collaboration with coworkers that boost personal productivity.
It supports to have all important company information and documents well organized and accessible in one central location. It allows to plan, track and keep everyone aligned with a shared project roadmap. It supports to keep track of all your docs with custom keywords, set due dates and add team mates.
Vendor: Notion Labs, Inc.
Company Size: NA
HQ Location: San Francisco, CA
Financials: PRIVATE
KnowledgeOwl helps organizations of all sizes build be
KnowledgeOwl is a knowledge base software designed for organizations to help manage content and create information repository which facilitates enhancement in employee performance.
The platform features customized creation of Internal Knowledge Bases, FAQ & External Knowledge Bases, Self-Service Help Sites and Software Documentation. Some of the key features offered by the tool includes information categories and sub-categories, content tagging, content sharing, SSO authentication, customized user level access, WYSIWYG editor, article templates, logo customization and custom PDFs.
The content created on this platform can be created on a private domain and customized using CSS, HTML, and Javascript.
Vendor: SilkWeb LLC
Company Size: 01-10
HQ Location: 2552 W 133rd Circle, Broomfield, Colorado 80020, US
Financials: PRIVATE
Go beyond intranet software to the digital ...
Claromentis is an interactive digital workplace software that incorporates intranet software, communication and collaboration tools, e-forms and workflows, e-learning, and project management. It helps employees to communicate, collaborate, learn, manage tasks, and share knowledge in an interactive environment boosting internal communication and business collaboration.
It replaces multiple tools with one platform that enables people to communicate, share information, and build a community, regardless of where they are located. Provides staff with the opportunity to be heard, get their work done faster, and feel like a central part of the business. Also, easily develop feature-rich intranets and productivity platforms to safeguard data and the business.
Some of its key features include increasing productivity in the teams with an integrated intranet platform, improving accuracy with smart workflows technology, easily accessing learning content from the Learning Management System dashboard, efficiently managing projects in one central workspace, and so on.
Claromentis offers a number of powerful modules straight out of the box – we’re really looking forward to bringing this functionality to the users in our business.Phil
Project Leader
Nationwide
Vendor: Claromentis Ltd.
Company Size: 11-50
HQ Location: Brighton, East Sussex
Financials: PRIVATE
A single community destination for all customer needs
inSided is a customer success community platform built to help B2B SaaS businesses improve customer success and retention. It helps to improve digital and social presence and enhance customer relationships.
It’s a self-service platform driving customer success, scaling support, increasing retention, and delivering the best product experience. inSided leverages the power of community to measurably improve customer engagement and self-service in Customer Success.
inSided features for efficient customer success include a community platform to scale support by letting users help each other, a knowledge base that provides users the answers to their questions and share the expert knowledge with the community, and in-product support to boost product adoption and reduce time to value new users and many more.
We are very happy with the way the project was managed, both from a purely professional side and a cultural fit between SoundCloud & inSided point of view.Mathis Peckedrath
Community Manager
SoundCloud
Vendor: Gainsight, Inc
Founded: 2011
Company Size: 251-500
HQ Location: 1400 Bridge Pkwy Suite 101, Redwood City, CA 94065
Financials: SERIES E
Highly versatile Open Source wiki software
DokuWiki is an open source wiki software designed for companies to help create corporate knowledge base, private notebook, software manual, project workspace and CMS – intranet.
The primary features offered by the tool includes Simple and HTML syntax, page revisions, media upload, Customizable Interwiki links, namespaces content categorization, section editing, Toolbar and accesskeys, automatic table of contents, autosave, content locking, Index-based fulltext search, Pagecaching and Ajax-enhanced Interface. To help facilitate Access Control and Anti-Spam Measures, the tool offers read only pages, extended Access Control Lists, Spam blacklist, Delayed Indexing and Mail address obfuscation.
The platform does not require any database and utilizes plain text based files. The layout can be customized through multiple available templates and features can be extended via available plugins.
Vendor: DokuWiki
Knowledge Management is about creating, storing, retrieving and sharing information and knowledge within an organization. The objective of knowledge management is to provide a one-stop-shop repository of information pertaining to the organization’s processes, knowledge, best practices, lessons learned, capabilities and so on. The core of this repository is the insights, experiences, and expertise of individuals serving in the organization that makes it a process-driven than a person driven culture.
In order to inculcate an effective Knowledge Management culture, organizations adopt the usage of tools and software to capture, store and disseminate knowledge across the board. A robust Knowledge Management (KM) software is the key to integrate all verticals of an organization by means of information sharing.
The information and knowledge in any organization could be diverse, broad and deep across all levels of its existence. It is necessary to have access to such information quickly in a meaningful way, which due to the scattered nature, may not be easy. This is precisely where Knowledge Management software provides the much needed single platform through which you can access the needed information quite easily.
According to a market research study report, KM software market size is valued at USD 25.7 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach USD 73.16 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 12.5% from 2022 to 2030.
With the proliferation of digital devices and online consumers, there is an increased need to provide top-of-the notch customer service. This has led to reduced call handling time, improved governance and increased customer satisfaction which has fueled the growth of the KM software market.
In any organization, a well-organized knowledge management improves employee efficiency, customer and business satisfaction, and overall service quality. It provides a base for accurate and dependable data.
Knowledge Management Software supports a central repository of key organizational information such as processes and procedures, the current state of delivery, reusable templates and techniques, standardization of operations, FAQs, self-help guides, metrics for benchmarking your quality of deliverables, dashboards and so on. This provides a consistent and reliable view of this information that would, in turn, enable better customer satisfaction, speedier time to fix, greater productivity and increased collaboration and innovation across all levels of the organization.
Often, business or customer challenges get repeated over a period of time. Therefore, the organization can learn from past experiences, devise mechanisms and solutions to avoid such repeated occurrences and enhance the productivity of its workforce. The KMS acts as a valuable source of information that can provide you with fixes to these issues and reduce the repeat factor, standardized documents, best practices, processes, and self-help guides that greatly enable the reuse of organization-wide approved artifacts and reduce the ongoing support effort.
The essence of Management is to make Knowledge productive
Change is a constant phenomenon and organizations need to have processes and systems in place to have business continuity despite these changes. The changes could be in any dimension, be its new management, new team, new customer or new function to name a few. With Knowledge Management Software, you do not need to reinvent the wheel as the information is safely stored and organized. Your organizational knowledge stays in one place and current even if people come and go.
Organizations continuously strive to set new benchmarks in their growth targets, delivery capability and evaluate the evolving business needs. This requires organizations to anticipate the upcoming business trends and transform them into full-scale business opportunities. The past data about winning or losing customers and related root cause analysis help in analyzing how to approach newer opportunities. Lessons learned from past experiences and best practices help a lot to increase employee productivity and customer satisfaction that in turn enhances the NPS of an organization. A well organized and designed KM system will provide the necessary information to help you with these business decisions. For instance, for any sales opportunity, you can review the past statistics pertaining to planned vs actual sales, sales by demography, what could have been done better for greater sales, how to extrapolate the sales trends in the past and plan for a growth trajectory and so on. The reuse of proven solutions rather than reinventing the wheel is another aspect where your customer satisfaction can be maintained or enhanced, increasing productivity and thereby better capacity utilization as well.
Typically the software is used by any department of an organization.
The KM function head is responsible for the KM strategy, operations and staff that brings about the end to end implementation of the KM system.
The KM manager is the one who plans the KM rollout, identifies the plans of action, coordinates with the dependent departments, gets the required personnel to implement the system and provides the training plans to get everyone up to speed.
All the relevant stakeholders in an organization are part of the KM community who can don different roles while accessing the knowledge base. These roles could be creator, administrator, database analyst, planner, reporting lead, integration specialist and so on. The end-users could be either internal to the organization or external, depending on the need of the KM Software usage.
As organizations mature and businesses constantly evolve to meet the ever-increasing expectations of the customer, an accurate view of its current baseline of all its functions is of great importance. A robust KM system, therefore, serves as the backbone of any organization to keep pace with the current and future needs. If the use case of sales and marketing is taken into perspective, the KM system provides many benefits.
The sales representatives front end the engagement with your target customers and hence it is of utmost importance that they are effectively trained to sell your services and products. A good Knowledge Management Software does precisely this and provides the past and present data points thereby ensuring that the sales representatives understand the customer needs better and are able to tailor customized solutions. They are fully equipped with the customer context which is derived from KMS.
In addition as employees attrite or move to other opportunities within the organization, the Knowledge Management Software serves as the basis for new employee training thereby reducing the overall time needed to ramp up. This also helps existing employees refine their knowledge levels by leveraging the existing artifacts to bring them up to speed.
A good knowledge base will have all the relevant information to act on customer queries, complaints or new business opportunities. The key is the time to respond and the quicker it is the better for the organization and your customer. Again in the sales paradigm, the sales representatives can independently assess the knowledge base and quickly turnaround the necessary information to the customer thereby increasing their productivity and efficiency.
It is observed that 80% of customers are asking 20% of all questions. It means that most questions were asked before. The usage of KM Software will reduce the sales and support requests by providing similarly already answered questions from your knowledge base to the customers. With further automation, answers can be provided in a self-help manner when there is a sales or support request.
You can also improve customer support quality and efficiency by getting it right the first time. Giving an accurate and professional answer could be as simple as redirecting your customers to one of the Knowledge Base articles.
Customer feedback provides a great channel for gathering information about what could be improved and optimized. A well-designed Knowledge Management System gives you the capability to solicit customer feedback and suggestions in order to get insights into their thought process. These data points could then help to incorporate process improvements, functional changes, align to customer expectations, increase NPR and further enhance your knowledge management system with continuous improvements. You can tune your sales and marketing strategies by aligning to your customer feedback and thereby increasing your strike rate of winning new businesses.
In today’s complex and distributed environment, the teams typically are in different geographies and time zones. It becomes increasingly difficult to be consistent in the way organizations operate, especially the sales and marketing teams that generate business. The knowledge base platform provides a seamless communication channel between the two teams and makes it easier to share product information, sales and marketing promos, industry trends, analytics and so on thereby ensuring that the teams are on the same page and there is no element of surprise.
Since the KM system has a vast amount of different types of information, the user needs a good search mechanism to get access to the right information. KM systems can come with a rudimentary search mechanism based on filters or can incorporate a more sophisticated search engine. It also needs to provide good navigation capability. Some of the common navigation mechanisms like tree view, category-based are widely used. The user can search for information through the use of filters to narrow down the results in the KM system. In addition, the use of artificial intelligence capabilities enhances search experience.
Knowledge is power, but has little value unless it is easily accessed and put into practice
Ability to gather and consolidate disparate and divergent data from different sources and provide a single platform to process this data into meaningful information.
To enable the stakeholders to collaborate in real-time and be able to share information through different sets of artifacts.
Knowledge Management Software should provide an easy mechanism for content creators to produce content with user-friendly editors, styling tools.
Access the needed information through analytics and dashboards. This provides an end to end view of all data points and enables senior management to make appropriate business decisions
Provide access control to your knowledge center and set roles and access levels for administrators, managers, and employees. You can also set permissions for internal or external groups of stakeholders who can access the portal.
Modern Knowledge Management Software are cloud-based solutions that provide a secure and central environment to your organization’s Knowledge Database. However, large enterprises prefer to have an on-premise deployment of Knowledge Management Software.
A key feature of a KMS is to allow customization at different levels of the portal - user interface, integration with other applications, seamless data import/export capability, executive dashboarding and so on
You will have visibility into who last created, updated and accessed the content. The latest versions are always visible but you can also retrieve the older versions if needed
Choosing the right software will go a long way in creating the capability for knowledge management. The key parameters to be considered during the process of shortlisting the tool are as follows:
Who would be the users of the KM system? Will it be used internally or be exposed to external customers as well?
Are you looking for a cloud-based solution or on-premise or a mix of both?
Does the tool provide customization ability and integration layer to connect to other subsystems of the organization?
Evaluate the list of features that the tool provides by default and how much you will need to customize to meet your requirements.
Key features that a typical software vendor will provide are listed in this document but other vendors may provide added features like mobile app solution, unlimited capacity, discounted licensing fees, slice and dice analytics and so on. You need to consider these factors before deciding your final choice of the vendor
How is the user interface implemented for your usage? It needs to be intuitive. Does the interface provide you at a glance how to do basic functions like search, reporting and content management?
Assess the learning curve for the users of the system. Does the company offer good technical support, user support, guides, tutorials and training? Is there an online forum of the user community to share tips and solutions to common problems? Do you have visibility of the product roadmap and upgrade cycles, communication through various channels like voice, email, chat and so on?
The cost of implementing a good and robust KMS involves not only the cost of the software but also necessary infrastructure to deploy and the people who are required to maintain it. Cloud-based solutions would have lesser overheads and be more suited to mid-tier companies. But companies who need an on-premise solution need to consider additional costs.
Also, investment in KMS is a long term decision and hence ongoing cost would have a bearing.
You have to ascertain whether you have the need to invest in formal Knowledge Management Software considering the size of your company, the complexity of the projects undertaken and the diversity of the departments involved in the overall workflow. How does the manual effort currently function and does it necessitate the need for automation?
Knowledge Management is a means, not an end
Training and rollout to all relevant stakeholders are of prime importance in adopting the software. Each and every stakeholder should be comfortable with using the software on the expected lines.
The software vendor needs to have a good track record of technical and user-based support and training for the users of the software. As stated above, this could pose a major challenge if not given its due importance.
For the first time users of the Knowledge Management Software, they should brace for resistance from people within and outside the organization. The organization must use a top-down approach to communicate the benefits and value of the KM system in terms of efficiency, productivity and cost savings. This management of change is extremely important to ensure that all the involved stakeholders are on the same page.
Once the system is in place, the other challenges will be around keeping the momentum going, ensuring that all stakeholders understand its value and accepting it as part of their work and always keep it current and relevant. Often, KM is considered as a peripheral activity and hence needs constant motivation, incentives, and senior management support,
The use of social media is very widespread and provides a rich source of information that can be mined for usable knowledge. The Knowledge Management Software can integrate with the social media and leverage the content for the organization’s benefit
The latest BI tools and technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning can handle large data sets and thus enable the processing of patterns, trends, insights, and other useful information. Organizations that harness such BI tools for their knowledge management will have a better success rate with their business decisions, productivity, and operational efficiencies.
KM Maturity Model is a structured approach to implement a Knowledge Management System. It would be helpful if you are able to arrive at an analysis of your current and to-be state of knowledge management. How does your KM system measure against the industry models and frameworks? Your assessment would indicate the current maturity state and you can then plan for improvements to the system for higher maturity
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Guided Tours - XSOL - VISUALLY BETTER
Vendor: XSOL Limited
Company Size: 11-50
HQ Location: Level 2, 149 Parnell Road Parnell, Auckland 1052 New Zealand
Financials: PRIVATE
Documentation platform to craft amazing web user manuals
Docsie is a web-based documentation platform that enables businesses to build, maintain and publish excellent product documentation in multiple languages. It helps users to analyze how their customers interact with documentation and provide users insights on how to improve their docs. It helps to bring the companies together, save time by simplifying the product documentation workflow and reducing reliance on multiple documentation tools.
Vendor: Docsie LLC
HQ Location: Canada
All-in-One knowledge management system....
Vendor: AllAnswered
Company Size: 51-200
Financials: NA
MAKES INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, CONTRACT, AND DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT SIMPLE...
Vendor: HAL 9000 Systems, Inc.
Company Size: NA
HQ Location: 19 Umgeni Street, Three Rivers, Vereeniging, 1929, Gauteng, South Africa
Financials: NA
Centralizes your information sources for a smooth and optimal search | Wuha
Vendor: Wuha.
Company Size: 11-50
HQ Location: 40 rue Laure Diebold , Lyon, Auvergne Rhône-Alpes 69009, FR
Financials: NA
Publish beautiful docs and centralize team's knowledge.
Vendor: GitBook
Company Size: 11-50
HQ Location: 3, Cours Charlemagne, Lyon, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes 69002, FR
Financials: SEED
ChatBot Powered Knowledge Management
Elqano is a Knowledge Management ChatBot that allows businesses to collect, categorize, store and share business knowledge with employees and individuals outside an organization. It helps to reverse this trend by answering collaborators' knowledge needs.
Vendor: elqano
Company Size: 251-500
HQ Location: Paris, France 75008, FR
Financials: SEED
Deckard A.I - Deckard A.I. the AI powered platform for teams of software developers
Deckard is an AI-powered Knowledge Management platform curated for developers to help access all the project related information in one place. The tool captures the notes and chat and includes in the code documentation, making it easy for the onboarding new developers.
Vendor: Deckard Technologies, Inc.
Company Size: 1-10
HQ Location: Berlin, Germany
Financials: SEED
Galisto® supports you on the way to the knowledge based company
Vendor: Galisto AG
HQ Location: Rebenstrasse 25, Lostorf, 4654, CH
New generation synthetic content creation platform....
Vendor: cocoom
Company Size: 1-10
HQ Location: 92, Cours Lafayette, Lyon, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes 69003, FR
Financials: PRIVATE
SlimWiki Beautiful Wikis for Teams
SlimWiki is a cloud based wiki platform for teams and organizations of any size. Its online tool designed to help team members to use collaboratively for creating content and sharing knowledge directly from the browser.
Vendor: SlimWiki Pte. Ltd
Company Size: 1-10
Financials: PRIVATE
Slideboxx - PowerPoint Slide Library and Database
Vendor: Zinali, LLC
Company Size: 2-10
HQ Location: PO BOX 410743, San Francisco, 94141-0743, US
Financials: NA
Organize your resources in an online ebinder - livebinders.com
Vendor: LiveBinders, Inc.
Company Size: 11-50
HQ Location: 795 Folsom Street, 1st Floor, San Francisco, CA 94107, US
Financials: PRIVATE
Unlock The Value of Your Enterprise's Knowledge...
Vendor: LearnLode Limited
Company Size: 1-10
HQ Location: The Rubicon Centre, Rossa Avenue, Bishopstown, Cork City
Financials: PRIVATE
A Talent Screening and Assessment Platform
Ducknowl is a talent screening and assessment platform that helps to save time, reduce cost and screen the best talent. It allows recruiters and HR professionals to screen the applicants in a shorter time and more accurately. It performs resume screening, video screening and technical screening from one dashboard.
Vendor: Ducknowl LLC
Company Size: 11-50
HQ Location: 1136 S Delano Ct E, B201, Chicago, Illinois 60605, US
Financials: PRIVATE
Delivers the foundational Knowledge Management, Collaboration and Search capabilities .....
Vendor: Fogbeam Labs
Company Size: 1-10
HQ Location: 200 Westminster Drive, 83-G, Chapel Hill, NC 27514, US
Financials: PRIVATE
