Every organization has its own particular vocabulary. It’s usually drawn from sector-specific parlance, with special additions that signify “belonging” and serve as shorthand for everyone in the know.

Below are some thoughts about the importance of speaking the language of your senior management and of your organization as a whole.

In their recent Harvard Business Review article, Help Employees Create Knowledge—Not Just Share It, John Hagel III and John Seely Brown argue “the most valuable form of learning today is actually creating new knowledge.” Traditional KM systems represented a huge leap forward in terms of making explicit knowledge accessible and structured, but what knowledge management strategies and applications do we need in today’s business environment in order to maximize the intersection of knowledge and learning?

“Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.” The origin of this quote is unclear, but it is often cited in the education sector during discussions about how best to motivate students and improve teaching skills. The concept is equally relevant to customer service, and therefore applies to librarians and other information professionals.

In a recent article, Knowledge Management in the Age of Social Media, author Robin Singh suggests that social media presents serious challenges to the traditional "knowledge base," and asks whether it can transform knowledge management. Please read on for some additional thoughts on social knowledge exchange as a supplement to classic KM.

In Neil Olonoff’s excellent post “Knowledge Management Tools That Aren’t Tools,” he takes us back to the basic purpose and definition of a tool: something that is supposed to make work easier. It’s easy to agree with that, yet there are so many KM “tools” that only complicate matters, and make work harder. And there in a nutshell is the biggest barrier to user adoption.

I’m reading a wonderful book at the moment, called “The Little Paris Bookshop,” by Nina George. In it, one of the characters says, “The others all left with the riddle unsolved; none of them asked the right questions. Asking questions is an art.” In my experience, that is very true …and the ability to practice that art in support of a patron’s or user’s needs is a librarian’s secret weapon.

People at organizations with underperforming KM platforms can really struggle to find information; unfortunately, they pretty much need to know exactly what they want and where it is, before they can find it. A great KM platform solves that problem.

If your organization relies on a shared drive or a DMS—or an underpowered knowledge management system—to house or reference critical information assets, that’s a real handicap. It means you can only retrieve valuable content if you know exactly what you want (and where it is), and that means you often have to rely on institutional memory.

This is the third post in a series in which I share experiences from decades as an Information Services Director, including my best tips, my worst mistakes, and lessons learned. Please read on for some thoughts about the importance of speaking the language of your senior management and of your organization as a whole.

This is the second post in a series in which I’ll share experiences from my decades as an Information Services Director. Many special librarians, researchers or knowledge managers get promoted through the ranks into senior management roles without the benefit of formal training in administrative and operational areas. That was the case with me, and in this series I’ll share my best tips, my worst mistakes, and lessons learned. Please read on for some thoughts about developing your most productive departmental strategy.

This is the first post in an occasional series in which I’ll share experiences from my decades as an Information Services Director. Many librarians, researchers or knowledge managers get promoted through the ranks into senior management roles without the benefit of formal training in administrative and operational areas—me included. That can make things …interesting! In this series I’ll share my best tips, my worst mistakes, and lessons learned. Please read on for the most illuminating interview question you can ask when you’re hiring.

Knowledge management has an image problem. Nobody really knows what KM is, and it’s very easy to devalue. Companies that provide KM software need to market themselves via use cases (a technique that identifies the business goals to be accomplished by a software system) in order to make the light bulb go on for prospective customers. Individual practitioners need to do something similar.

One of the biggest challenges when implementing a knowledge management strategy or platform is getting leadership buy-in and visible advocacy. If you have that, it goes a long way to solving a second significant challenge: user engagement and adoption. A sticky marketing approach can help.

I recently watched a great series on Acorn TV, titled “Liberty of London.” It’s about how the iconic British department store, founded in 1875, has been revitalized to broaden its appeal, enhance its image and expand its client base. They didn’t change the store name – it’s a huge asset. But they did a lot of things that change how the store is perceived.

I recently saw a great infographic based on Larry Cooperman’s book, Managing the One-Person Library. It’s a “test” that allows you to assess whether you have the right stuff to operate as a solo librarian (and it can also be used as a recruiting and hiring aid). Please read on for some secrets to effective one-person library management.

Marketing anything is about building relationships. For libraries, making a personal connection is extremely important, because it leads both to advocacy and increased usage of services and products.

Solo librarians may not have the same options as their counterparts in larger organizations when it comes to following all three sticky marketing tenets but they are often uniquely positioned to optimize one of them: make a personal connection.

Ye Olde Reference Interview. It offers an excellent opportunity to practice “Sticky Marketing,” allowing you to meet your users where they are (in this case, in the context of a research project) and to make a personal connection that results in the library being more integrated with employees’ daily workflow.

Attaching the library to regular training sessions - particularly onboarding for new hires - opens up a great marketing channel for the library, while offering important benefits to new employees.