As a specialist financial services consultancy, knowledge is our most valuable asset. Here are some tips we’ve learned from working with organisations to build effective knowledge management systems.
Go back to basics
Company growth can lead to multiple repositories of information with different processes and degrees of engagement from users. A fragmented information estate with no clear direction can lead to a “broken window” effect, where your users expect to be frustrated by your knowledge base and so stop trying to contribute.
Avoid this by designing your new architecture from first principles; don’t just make existing processes faster or slicker! Determine who your users are, what information they work with, and what they want to do with that information. Then, define a set of guiding principles to support any changes you may need to implement.
Engage your users from start to finish
Work with your business to define a set of use cases; these can be used as requirements for your new information architecture. Align your design with natural work patterns rather than risking disruption with major changes in ways of working.
When it looks good on paper, it’s time to prove your system works in practice. Use a test environment to gather valuable insights with user champions from across your business. This allows you to rapidly iterate on your design.
Challenge assumptions
You may need new tooling to support your architecture. The world of enterprise software moves at pace and market leaders change each year. Use your guiding principles to review software options through a focused lens.
Be sure to challenge preconceptions about particular software or vendors and take an objective look at the market. Given the rate of change in this industry, the best solution may surprise you!
Understand your business’ language
Organising information is easier if everyone agrees on terminology. Work with your users to develop a “taxonomy”, a classification of business words and how they relate to each other. Many document management software options support metadata tagging on documents. You can use your taxonomy to create useful tags for your content.
Use this to develop a user-first approach to navigation. We recommend supporting different styles of navigation to suit diverse working preferences. This could include traditional hierarchical page links, page searching, and AI assistants like Microsoft Copilot.
Make compromises
Finally, an information architecture that looks great on paper isn’t very useful if people don’t use it! It’s important to make your system accessible so that people will continually engage with it. This could involve making changes to promote usability over purity of architectural design.
A good system makes usage seamless and integrates well with the tools where most of your users do their work. It should also leverage the data repositories that are already in use, where possible. This may deviate from your original design but improve its effectiveness in practice.
Conclusion
With these tips in mind, it’s important to know that your information architecture project will never be “done” and will continue to evolve along with your business. Good knowledge management requires regular reviews and reinvestment to ensure information is high quality and readily available. Any effort you spend doing this is returned many times over.
Finally, a great information architecture benefits from expert advice and incorporates industry best practices. For more information about how Altus can help with this, contact us.
