The Need for Knowledge Governance

Once your organization has established its Knowledge Management Program and has populated the knowledge repository with the corporate knowledge assets, it is now time to provide for the "care and feeding" and the ongoing maintenance of your corporate knowledge. In order to do this a governance plan has to be established and executed.
Content (information and knowledge) governance is the orchestration of people, process, and technology to enable the organization to leverage content as an enterprise asset. Content governance details the managing of issues around incomplete content, poor or untimely access to content, lack of or poor metadata and managing and resolving duplicate (or similar) content.

The Knowledge Governance Plan describes the policies, procedures, roles, and responsibilities, as it pertains to maintaining content. Effective governance planning and the application of the governance plan are critical for the ongoing success of your knowledge management program.

The Knowledge Governance plan will establish the processes and policies to:

• Avoid content proliferation
• Ensure Content is maintained by implementing quality management policies
• Establish clear decision-making authority and escalation procedures so policy violations are managed and conflicts are resolved on a timely basis.
• Ensure that the solution strategy is aligned with business objectives so that it continuously delivers business value.
• Ensure that content is retained in compliance with record retention guidelines.

This is just the beginning of understanding how to govern your knowledge assets. If your organization will or has established a governance plan for it's knowledge assets I would like to hear from you!