With the ongoing revolution in the types of knowledge management systems available to organizations, the variety of knowledge-sharing options is expanding so quickly that many have trouble keeping up. But when we take a close look at the matter, many of the most useful knowledge management systems are quite accessible in that they are the same as or similar to things that most of us use all the time. So for now let’s leave all the technical jargon to the pros and consider a few basic types of web-based knowledge management systems that many companies are using to great effect.

Document-sharing systems

There are currently available a number of popular and versatile services that enable companies and groups of individuals to share and collaborate on documents of all kinds, including word-processing documents, spreadsheets, slide presentations, and so on. Google Docs is the most widely used of these services, and though it has some drawbacks, it does offer versions of the Docs suite designed for organizational use. Similar services also offer organizational options.

Wikis

The success of Wikipedia has called attention to the usefulness of crowdsourcing as a tool for gathering and organizing information in the internet age. Wikipedia has no central authority through which all its content must pass but rather relies on people who care about information to vet all the articles, which of course are completely user-generated, and edit them as needed.

Many companies are not large enough to emulate this model on an organizational scale, because after all it does require a great number of contributors to make a Wiki succeed. But larger companies certainly can benefit from a Wiki designed to contain all of the company’s sharable information. The challenge is incentivizing employees to contribute, but there are many tactics for this.

Social networking

Many companies have put in place systems that prevent their employees from using social networking services like Facebook and Twitter while they are supposed to be working. But while this impulse is certainly understandable, some companies could actually stand to benefit from plugging into these services and harnessing their employees’ collective social energies to create an instantaneous knowledge management system.

There are many models for creating a workable social-networking-based knowledge management system, and not all of them work for all companies. But when they are well run, they can be astonishingly efficient ways for companies to share information internally and for employees to get fast answers to their questions.

Web portals

Finally, there is the more traditional web-based approach to knowledge management—setting up a website to contain all the company’s sharable information. This approach involves assigning an individual or group of individuals the task of building and maintaining the website, which makes it less efficient for large companies with lots of information to process. But for smaller companies, a web portal with news, communications, and other useful information is a great way to keep the channels open between all levels of the company. And some types of public web portals can also be useful for marketing purposes if they are searchable online.