Enterprise knowledge management (EKM) is a term used to describe the process of managing your organization’s critical knowledge assets.
It’s important because it helps you identify, collect, and store all the valuable information you have about your business processes, products and services, people, and so on. This can help improve organizational efficiency by providing a single source of truth when it comes to information that relates to your organization’s operations.
The Enterprise Knowledge Management (EKM) model
Enterprise Knowledge Management (EKM) is an enterprise-wide approach to knowledge management. It integrates various traditional tools and practices into one framework that can be used to support different aspects of an organization’s work, such as collaboration or innovation.
The CMDB is one of these tools. It is used to manage information about assets and configurations in your environment. By combining EKM with other tools like the CMDB, you can create a comprehensive picture of your entire organization’s knowledge assets and make sure they’re all up-to-date.
When you’re a knowledge worker, it’s easy to get bogged down in the details. You have so much information coming at you from all directions that it can be difficult to keep track of what’s important, and what’s not.
That’s where an enterprise knowledge management system comes in. It gives staff members confidence by matching them with the information they need to not only complete typical tasks but leverage expertise and experience from others to do it more efficiently.
The benefits of enterprise knowledge management are well-documented, but they’re not just important for your organization right now—they’ll be important in the future, too.
Enterprise knowledge management provides a way to capture, store, and share every bit of knowledge that your current employees have acquired over their careers. It’s a way to make sure that all that hard-fought wisdom doesn’t get lost when someone leaves your company—or even dies.
It can also help boost employee confidence by making information more accessible to them. When people know everything they need is at their fingertips, they feel more empowered and confident in their work.
Enterprise knowledge management promotes collaboration by making it easier for employees with different areas of expertise to communicate with one another. It simplifies communication between teams by providing a central location where employees can find answers to questions or problems they’re working on together. And it enhances new hire training and onboarding by providing an easy-to-use platform where new hires can access all the information they need about their company’s products and services as soon as they start working there.
Read: CMDB discovery techniques you must know
What is CMDB?
CMDB is a database that contains information about the configuration, management and control of an organization’s IT infrastructure. The purpose of this database is to provide a single source of truth for all assets within your enterprise; providing visibility into what you have, where it is located, who has access to it and how they are using it.
This enables effective asset management across your business units or departments so that they can make better decisions through improved visibility into their own environments while also providing insights into cross-departmental dependencies which can prevent outages due to misconfigurations between applications or services running in different silos within your organization.
CMDB also serves as an essential tool for ITIL compliance because it provides better service levels by supporting incident management processes such as problem escalation/escalation plans, incident reporting procedures including time-to-fix estimates, change management activities such as version control and change request tracking system, and so on.
It also aids other critical functions such as capacity planning and forecasting needs based on historical trends, budgeting process optimizations through accurate demand forecasts based on actual usage patterns vs projected demand data provided by vendors’ sales teams.
The CMDB as a source for Enterprise Knowledge Management
The CMDB is an open platform that can be used to store, manage and share knowledge assets. The CMDB provides a single point of reference for all IT assets in your organization. It contains detailed information about each asset such as the owner, location, and status of use.
The CMDB can be used to store the following types of knowledge:
- Technical information related to software applications (e.g., operating system name)
- Business process documentation (e.g., account opening procedure)
- Documentation on policies and procedures (e.g., change management policy)
The CMDB is integral to the Knowledge Management process and SKMS. It stores detailed information on each configuration item, such as their type, characteristics, and links to other CIs, which the SKMS can access and utilize to optimize asset management and deployment.
The SKMS can use this information to determine if an asset needs to receive additional resources or maintenance before deployment, or if it should be reallocated to a different team that has a better understanding of its current state or needs. This helps managers make better decisions about how to allocate their resources.
The SKMS also uses this information to improve forecasting by identifying patterns in usage over time that can help predict when maintenance may be required before it becomes necessary.
Finally, this data can also help identify opportunities for business growth by identifying gaps in coverage or areas where there are too many assets being managed by too few people.
ITIL’s Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is a crucial component of the Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS). Without a well-maintained and accurate CMDB, the SKMS would lack vital information, impairing its ability to efficiently manage knowledge.
Without a CMDB, your organization would be forced to use multiple tools to manage its knowledge assets (which is not ideal).
The CMDB helps you organize, monitor, and maintain all of your company’s assets in one place. It allows you to easily see which assets are available, who needs them, where they are located and how they’re being used.
Do you need a custom CMDB? Find out
The need for an enterprise knowledge repository in an organization
As a business, you need to make sure that the knowledge within your organization is accessible and can be utilized by employees. This means creating an environment where employees are able to easily share their ideas with one another, which can be done by creating a centralized repository for all types of information.
By leveraging an enterprise knowledge repository based on an existing CMDB, organizations can manage their critical knowledge assets to gain even greater value from them.
As a company grows, it can become more difficult to retain the knowledge of its staff. This is true for both new hires and seasoned employees who may have been with the company for years.
As companies grow and change, so does their need for knowledge management. The accumulation of knowledge by individuals within an organization is essential for its success. In addition, sharing this information throughout the organization informs staff of past approaches that improve performance or better inform new strategies.
When you’re an organization that relies on knowledge, data, and information to function, it’s important to have a complete picture of all the data you’ve collected. That way, you can make decisions based on your full understanding of what you know about your organization and its capabilities.
Without adequate knowledge collection techniques, companies are in danger of making poor decisions based on incomplete or incorrect information—which can lead to serious mistakes and lost revenue.
To ensure that this doesn’t happen, companies should audit their existing staff expertise, documentation and external knowledge sources. This will help ensure that they have a complete picture of their organizational knowledge so they can make informed decisions going forward.
Read: Do you need a CMDB in a cloud environment?
Leverage Virima CMDB for effective knowledge management
It is clear that the CMDB is a valuable resource for EKM. It can provide an enterprise knowledge repository with many of the critical knowledge assets that are needed for successful implementation of an EKM strategy. However, it is important to note that there may be other sources as well, such as document management systems or corporate intranets.
Virima CMDB is a powerful tool that helps you manage your network infrastructure. It’s designed to give you a holistic view of your infrastructure relationships and network topology, including the communications of host-to-host connections and ghost machines not in your CMDB.
Virima’s communication view shows the flow and port numbers of host-to-host communications, as well as their interdependencies. This lets you see who’s talking to whom, which can help you identify potential security problems or internal bottlenecks. You can also see data such as the last time an IP address was seen on the network and whether it’s active or inactive.
The DevOps-style service topology views give you an overview of all services running on your network at any given time, including those that aren’t currently active but were recently seen on the network. This can help you keep track of changes over time so that you can identify any trends or spikes in activity that might indicate a problem with your infrastructure.
Virima CMDB allows users to store data about their systems’ configurations and relationships between those configurations in an easy-to-use database format with automated visualizations that make sense of the collected data.
In addition to storing data about assets and their relationships in one place, Virima CMDB also integrates with dozens of different software platforms so users can ingest all relevant information about their systems from different sources automatically into one place where it can be accessed easily by anyone who needs it.
Learn more about Virima CMDB by scheduling a demo now!
