Hi there,

Welcome to the inaugural issue of The Knowledge Champion!

In this first edition, I want to dive into the idea of Knowledge Operations in your business.

You have probably heard of Dev Ops and Rev (Revenue) Ops, but you may not have heard of Knowledge Ops.

When we talk about knowledge in an organization we use terms like Knowledge Management.

Why do we want to manage knowledge? Managing knowledge sounds like cataloging, organizing, reformatting, and rearranging. Managing knowledge is like having a beautifully kept and well-organized restaurant that nobody eats at. 

But, what if instead of managing knowledge we had a team in charge of operationalizing it?

Merriam-Webster defines “operationalize” as, “to make operational.”

Well, that isn’t very helpful. My 13-year-old responds this way when I ask him to define something. He just repeats the same words back to me in a different order and then I know he has no idea what it means.

But, if we dig into the word “operation,” we get some better definitions. My favorite is this one:

"an exertion of power or influence"

What if you could take the knowledge in your organization and help it exert power and influence on the way people actually do their jobs?

That sounds much more exciting than just managing knowledge!

Management focuses on capture, storage, and formatting.

Operations focus on usefulness, impact, and efficiency.

It’s not just documentation or technology.

Knowledge Operations isn’t just about managing a knowledge base.

It is about changing the way people value and rely on knowledge to do their job.

It is about complete empathy for the situation someone is in when they will need to access and use knowledge to answer a question, fix a problem, or complete a task.

It’s about training people to retrieve and use knowledge instead of trying to retain it in their working memory.

It is about improving performance, not just sending surveys or measuring page views.

Someone working in Knowledge Operations is curious. They dig deep to understand all that goes into a given procedure, task, or problem.

Their measurement of success is not how many words they wrote, but how many outcomes they helped achieve.

Knowledge Ops above all is about iteration and dogged persistence. Knowledge Management is satisfied with a tidy restaurant with a beautiful and complete menu, even if the chairs are empty.

Knowledge Ops isn’t satisfied until the restaurant is full and people are eating voraciously.

So, in this newsletter, we are going to be exploring the idea of Knowledge Operations.

Hopefully, this spurs some thoughts for you. I hope that you will share them back with me.

Thanks for joining us on this journey of discovery.

Talk soon,

Greg