Active and Passive Knowledge Base: What’s the Difference?

by | Mar 3, 2022 | Knowledge Base, Knowledge Management

Every organization should use a proper knowledge management tool, as it increases productivity by allowing the employees to have all the needed resources to perform their daily activities.

In addition, this helps fasten the organization’s processes and create better strategies. Sometimes people tend to work “blindly,” as they don’t know where to find certain information or are straight-up unaware of its existence.

This problem can be solved with a knowledge base or enterprise wiki. There are two types of knowledge bases to choose from.

In this article, you’re going to learn how each of these bases can benefit your business.

Table of Contents
1. What is Passive Knowledge Base
2. What is Active Knowledge Base
3. Types of Knowledge Management
4. Difference Between Passive and Active Knowledge Management Tools
5. Knowledge Management and the Company’s Workflow
6. Bottom Line

What is Passive Knowledge Base

Passive knowledge bases are the weakest of these two options. Many people don’t recommend them as they aren’t user-friendly, and most employees face difficulty when trying to find information and resources within them. This knowledge base makes people wonder whether the resources are really up to date, as there’s no real way to track the information.

Furthermore, this is very dangerous for teams’ productivity and overall wellbeing, as the frustration could affect their job and make them much slower than they usually are.

Although these knowledge bases are a lot cheaper than active knowledge bases, they are going to end up costing more money, as they are a direct threat to the company’s revenue.

What is Active Knowledge Management

This type of knowledge management makes companies succeed the most, as all of its processes are ingrained into the team’s workflow and it uses AI to help your employees find all the information they need in less than a heartbeat.

Active knowledge management is more dynamic and uses data to learn the team’s behavior and analyze patterns to deliver a much more comfortable experience.

Types of Knowledge Management

Even though we already went through passive and active knowledge management, these are just the two ends of the scale, and a knowledge management tool can fall anywhere in between. Now we’re going to learn more about the different classifications in that scale.

Extremely Active

This type of knowledge management does everything it is supposed to do. It is reliable for your workers because it analyses data, is completely integrated into your team’s operations, and has proven to give direct revenue to the company.

Highly Active

These are usually AI-powered management tools, which help you save time and make your processes a lot faster. However, if yours is highly active instead of “extremely,” it might be due to having a learning curve that’s a bit wide, or you’re, for some reason, unable to integrate it entirely into your operations.

Moderately Active

Moderately active management tools are those unable to analyze data or use statistics, although sometimes they only do very basic analysis. Analyzing data is a fundamental requirement to improve the user’s experience based on your employer’s habits within the app.

Somewhat Active

This management tool is only within the “green section” because it integrates itself into the team’s process and workflow. However, it doesn’t have a robust authentication feature, which leaves your data unprotected, and this could cause serious problems later on.

Neutral

Although the name “neutral” doesn’t indicate anything negative, having a neutral management tool isn’t good. These tools only provide the bare minimum to be functional, but their user experience tends to be very poor and lowers the team’s productivity.

Faintly Passive

If your management tool isn’t integrated into your workflow, it immediately classifies as passive. However, reaching this category signals a clear error in the quality of the material. You may have filled your knowledge tool with too much formal knowledge. Remember that people learn faster and better through informal knowledge, so please don’t forget to add it.

Somewhat Passive

Some management tools might trick you into thinking they’re active. However, if you find yourself not knowing if a document has been updated, the chances are that you have a passive management tool.

You should be able to navigate freely through the management app without any extra confirmations or notifications that ruin your user experience.

Moderately Passive

Having a moderately passive management tool is extremely dangerous for your business, as it can begin to affect your customer support, which ultimately takes a toll on your sales and revenue.

You can’t expect your team to do a good job when your company’s information is compromised, and when we’re dealing with clients, timing is everything, so they don’t run to the next store and buy from them instead.

Highly Passive

You may not be making sales for several reasons, but please don’t make your knowledge base be one of them. Having a highly passive knowledge base is as good as not having one. This is only going to hinder your team’s efforts to work correctly. 

The best advice we can give you is to invest in a better knowledge base and improve your chances to have a successful business.

Extremely Passive

It would be extremely rare for you to have one of these knowledge bases, as it would exasperate your whole team in less than one day. These knowledge bases can bring entire companies down, as they don’t meet any of the requirements needed to be a good knowledge base. Therefore, if you have one of these, you should stop using it as soon as you can.

What’s the Difference Between Passive and Active Knowledge Management Tools?

Although it may seem pretty clear by now, several characteristics differentiate passive management tools from active ones. Therefore, these are the traits you need to keep an eye on when searching for a knowledge base for your business.

Knowledge Management and the Company’s Workflow

In order for a knowledge base to be active, it must be completely integrated into the company’s workflow. This means that your employees don’t need to change from one tab to another every time they want to find a certain piece of information, as doing this tends to lower productivity.

All the resources should be where your people spend the most time in so they don’t have to waste energy looking for them and getting frustrated for not finding them.

Frequency of Updates

A good knowledge base must constantly be updated, as the information tends to get outdated, and new things can be added every day. That’s why it is essential to hire a good team of expert writers who can provide interesting and useful content every time your team needs it.

In addition, the software must indicate when the last time a topic was updated, so you know if the information is still reliable or not.

Quality of the Information

Aside from having new information, it also has to be high-quality information. The characteristics of good information are:

  • Relevant to the matter being discussed
  • Applicable to the real-life, and if possible, tested in real environments
  • Verified by theory books or scientific papers
  • Recent to the current year

In addition, it is important to consider that formal knowledge isn’t the only necessary knowledge that should be in your management tool. You should also have a fair share of informal knowledge and background from the company, the difficulties it has gone through, and how you solved them.

Statistics and Analysis

The best management tools are AI-based, which means they can learn your team’s patterns and create usage analyses that give you fascinating insights regarding their current necessities.

This way, you can plan out what content must be updated and create the next strategy for your knowledge base.

Security

Security is crucial if you want to have a good knowledge base. The chances are that you’re going to be keeping rather sensitive information in the management tool. Therefore, you need to find one with high-security protocols, such as two-factor authentication and encrypted codes.

Ensuring high data security within the tools you use is also going to make your employees feel a lot more comfortable with the platform, which is fantastic as we don’t want them to be worried about the company getting hacked or losing money.

Accessibility

Finally, the last feature you need to keep an eye on is the tool’s accessibility. It must be compatible with all kinds of devices, and you must be able to pair all your third-party apps to it.

This way, you’re going to provide complete comfort to your team so they can dedicate themselves to doing their job. Moreover, this also makes the app more reliable to your staff.

Bottom Line

After reading this article, you’re more than ready to find the best knowledge management system for your business. However, remember that active knowledge bases can give you much more opportunities to get the best of your team and exponentially expand its productivity and results.

If you still don’t know which knowledge management system to use, check out Klutch App, the best company knowledge management app that’s sure to boost your business and help you perform better than ever. Don’t hesitate to go to our website and find out about the fantastic deal we have for you.

Investing in your business is investing in your future!

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