Best Practices: Share Knowledge Across Your Organization

Why Knowledge Sharing Matters

As the use of Appian becomes more widespread across different groups, teams and divisions of your organization, the impact of siloed or lost knowledge can lead to project delays, lost opportunities for reuse or even having teams ‘reinvent the wheel’. When your Appian program expands, so too should your knowledge sharing efforts. Even simple search tools and sharing practices can help combat the $31.5B that the International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that Fortune 500 companies lose roughly a year due to poor or non-existent knowledge sharing.

But, it’s not just about sharing knowledge. Getting the most out of your efforts requires tailoring your investments to maximize your benefits. This guide will review best practices for knowledge sharing and scaling knowledge sharing practices. Before going further, let’s start with two important definitions:

Knowledge Sharing

The act of exchanging information or understanding between individuals, teams, departments, or organizations. It can occur asynchronously or synchronously depending on the type of knowledge being shared and via different mediums. In the context of a growing Appian practice, commonly used sharing mechanisms include dedicated chat rooms and spaces, folder drives with reusable resources, ‘lunch & learns,’ or other forms of dedicated meeting.

Knowledge

Takes a variety of forms such as insights gained from experience or explicit practices such as processes, how-to’s, and other documentation. Ultimately, it’s any sort of information that is useful for driving success and worth transferring from one group to another. For Appian, this frequently includes successful use cases, development or project management best practices, common pitfalls, and lessons learned.

Barriers and Benefits

The cost of poor knowledge sharing is easily overlooked but adds up when employees waste time searching for information or reinvent the wheel. If your organization is just getting started, expect barriers at the individual, cultural and technical levels.

A study from the Panopto Workplace Knowledge and Productivity Report found that the average worker wastes 5.3 hours every week either waiting on vital information from a colleague or recreating existing institutional knowledge. As such, organizations must also incentivize good knowledge sharing behavior and make it easy and rewarding for employees by investing in training, technology, and recognition.

Benefits from effective knowledge sharing include improved collaboration, productivity, and innovation. Additionally, effective knowledge sharing practices help build a positive corporate culture, improve employee morale and mitigate costs of lost knowledge and “brain drain."

Tailor Your Approach

Investments in knowledge sharing should be appropriately tailored to the scale of your Appian program, balancing costs versus potential benefits. The most successful organizations think of knowledge sharing as a journey and realize they don’t need to invest in ‘advanced’ knowledge sharing practices right from the start. However, the greater the scale of Appian activities, the more benefits there are in formalizing knowledge sharing practices.

Based on a knowledge sharing maturity framework by TSIA, the table below offers a simplified overview of activities and Appian-relevant stepping stones to help assess and mature your knowledge sharing practices.

Level 1: Documentation

At this stage, Appian activities are spread across a few teams supporting multiple applications. Knowledge sharing practices focus on documentation, encouraging informal collaboration across teams and sponsoring a variety of ad-hoc activities dedicated to information and practice sharing.

Once we had a few Appian teams up and running, it was surprising how quickly teams started missing opportunities to enable each other. But with just a bit of structure--things like a common repository for project documentation and a cross-team Slack channel--we’ve been able to improve collaboration across teams with minimal investment.

AVP of Automation, North America Financial Services Company

Level 2: Standardization

Appian’s footprint is across multiple teams managing multiple applications, at least some of which are business-impacting if they suffer an outage. At this level, there is increased emphasis on standardizing & routinizing knowledge sharing practices with formal incentives to encourage sharing behavior.

"As we started to build our Appian program across multiple teams, we quickly realized that we needed more than just ad-hoc team check-ins", says a Development Team Lead at a European Financial Services Company. "We established a regular cadence of meetings to help normalize cross-team [knowledge] sharing. Now, we’re working on a cross-team mentorship program to build on our early successes."

Level 3: Systemization

Appian applications and Appian-enabled initiatives aren't only widespread but often have a high degree of process or technical interdependency. At this level, organizations invest in establishing a formal process and dedicated resources—such as a Center of Excellence (CoE) or guilds—to maximize coordination and knowledge sharing. These systems help identify, document and disseminate best practices.

Knowledge Sharing Characteristics

Level	Technology	Incentives & Sponsorship	Practices
Level 1 Single department, multiple applications	️Dedicated chat room(s) Uncurated Appian team drive for document sharing Project retrospective Email group(s)	Senior management encourages open communication and collaboration Nominal recognition for knowledge sharing champions Informal incentives (eg. town hall shout-outs, peer-to-peer recognition, etc.) Time allotted to employees on ad-hoc basis	Capture knowledge learned through retrospectives Ad-hoc meetings dedicated to knowledge sharing Capture, save, and update materials ad-hoc
Level 2 Multiple departments, multiple applications	️️ Level 1 Items Appian best-practices ‘Wiki’ Team Templates (eg. Meeting Checklist, Communication Guide, New Project Template) Curated Appian team drive	Level 1 Items Formal incentives and rewards: example 1, example 2 Official recognition for knowledge sharing champions Encouraged, sponsored and practiced among team and management Expected in job description  Time allotted to employees on quarterly or monthly basis Partially dedicated knowledge steward	Level 1 Items Dedicated knowledge sharing sessions across organization (lunch & learns, monthly meeting, etc.) Resource(s) responsible for capturing, organizing, updating and disseminating information Capture, save and update materials on semi-regular basis
Level 3 Multiple departments, multiple applications with interdependencies	Level 2 Items Content is analyzed and updated/created new based on gaps Tools and surveys ️	Level 2 Items Dedicated  knowledge owner or captain Feedback on knowledge sharing  Increased incentives and rewards: example 1, example 2 Time allotted to employees on weekly basis  Expected and practiced among team and management	Level 2 Items Resource gap analysis  Center of Excellence with dedicated staff Integrated Appian roadmap Appian Communities of practice or guilds Matured capture, save, and updating materials on regular basis
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