Wouldn't it be nice to know you know what you know?

If your head is spinning from that title, here's another way of saying the same thing. Your business has accumulated a vast amount of data that can be of value to you now and as your business grows. But if all that data is not in a form that you can easily retrieve and analyse, it is of little use. You may actually be sitting on a treasure trove of information that could improve your customer service and your profit, but how to get hold of the treasure?

Knowledge Management can bring order to this chaos and help you find the nuggets buried in your data stores. Many small businesses simply do not realise that they have been building an unstructured collection of valuable data. Applying knowledge management tools can organize and mine this storehouse, and also make it possible for the information to be shared across the organization.

Too often, customer billing information is in one file, purchasing history is in another and client contact information in another. Project information including the skills needed, who worked on what, how long they took, and how much it cost compared to the revenue, all that is somewhere else. Imagine how valuable it would be to look down into your data stores and discover connections and relationships you might not have noticed before. What could that mean to building and enhancing customer relationships? To your company's strategic planning? What might you change if you discovered patterns of buying that you had not seen before?

In many ways, knowledge management is a living thing. As humans, we are constantly renewing ourselves. We recognise changing conditions, draw on our memories of what has served us well in the past to deal with change, visualise alternative outcomes, and make decisions about how we will proceed. We carry our database on our shoulders and make connections and see relationships that change continually as we gather new data from our experiences. That's very much like what a knowledge management system can do for a business.

In today's increasingly high-speed, competitive environment, businesses cannot afford to waste resources or miss opportunities. I've found that a frequent benefit of knowledge management is an increase in internal collaboration and sharing of best practices. As a company, you already know more than you think you know. And now you know that knowing is not enough; you have to be able to share knowledge and eliminate duplication.

Know what I mean?

At Chill we take the heat out of IT. No matter what pressure you are under, we will always keep our heads and make sure you get back up and running as soon as possible. So don't sweat - Chill IT. Click here for more information on our consulting services.

Project Management Headaches? Here's How to Get Relief

Have you ever tried to manage a number of projects, keeping track of resources, budgets, and milestones, and communicating essential information to everyone involved? It can make you feel like the juggler spinning plates, dashing from one to the next, trying to keep them all going at the same time. Inevitably, a plate comes crashing down.

As a small business, the project management tools available to you have been either hard to use or non-existent. Microsoft Project can be used for general planning, but unless you have a full-time expert on staff, MS Project is just too difficult to use. Large companies may make the investment to establish and maintain a project management office; it is simply not practical for most small to medium sized businesses.

That leaves spreadsheets for planning and tracking, and the challenge of rolling multiple spreadsheets into one summary to give management a useful overview of progress. For a one-time view it can work, but updating and maintaining data integrity of all the individual project spreadsheets creates more headaches than it solves.

So what is a growing, successful small business to do? You need a dashboard view for high level oversight, but you also need to be able to drill down and see up-to-date information on what is happening with each individual project. You need to communicate quickly, accurately, and completely with everyone involved, and be sure that they have information they need. Staying within time and budget limits requires the ability to manage change orders to avoid "scope creep". You need to view and distribute reports. And when a project is complete, you need to collect and analyze the all-important best practices that result.

All that functionality does not have to translate into higher system cost. In my experience, many tools over complicate the process. Adding complex features to software does not always translate into benefits, so don't assume that high-end will mean high quality results for your business. The ease of use is at least as important a factor in choosing your project management software as is the price. An expensive, complex program will only work as well as the people who have to use it every day. I've found that products such as BrightWork and CopperProject are wonderful at adhering to the KISS principle.

When you are ready to choose a project management solution, be sure you consider the less complex and lower cost options as part of your selection process. You and your budget may be pleasantly surprised!

At Chill we take the heat out of IT. No matter what pressure you are under, we will always keep our heads and make sure you get back up and running as soon as possible. So don't sweat - Chill IT. Click here for more information on our consulting services.