28.10.2026 | News 5 signs your company has a knowledge management problem
Knowledge is one of a company’s most important resources. However, for it to reach its full potential, it must be easily accessible to employees and usable in their day-to-day work. Five typical signs of shortcomings in knowledge management show that this isn’t always the case:
1. “Where can I find that again?” is a common question. To access the information they need, employees must search through various systems, folders, and applications. They spend more time searching for information than actually using it. Sometimes, even after a lengthy search, it’s unclear whether they’ve actually found the right information. This wastes time and can unnecessarily slow down work.
2. People are constantly reinventing the wheel. Employees create an analysis, a concept, or a client presentation. Shortly afterward, they happen to discover that a colleague has already created something very similar that they could have built on. They’ve spent time creating something new that already exists within the company.
3. Outdated documents are a constant source of trouble. Old price lists are used for quotes, outdated contract templates are sent to customers, or processes are carried out according to descriptions that are no longer valid. Often, the problem only comes to light when a customer complains or a colleague has to correct a process. In the worst case, it can even lead to compliance violations.
4. Nothing gets done without certain colleagues. If an employee is absent, no one knows how a particular process works, why a decision was made one way rather than another, or how to solve a tricky problem. This is problematic enough during vacations or sick leave, but when an employee changes jobs or retires, that knowledge may be lost entirely. Often, the problem is simply that employees don't have time to document their experience in their daily work. This is especially true for employees without their own computer workstations, such as those in production. Someone who has been working at a machine for years can immediately identify the source of a problem just by hearing an unusual noise. As long as this valuable experiential knowledge isn’t documented anywhere, it’s lost the moment that colleague is no longer there.
5. Onboarding new employees takes too long. New employees first have to find the right contact person—then the information. Especially when working from home, employees can't simply turn to a colleague to ask a quick question. Those who don’t know who is responsible for a particular topic or where relevant knowledge is located take significantly longer to become productive. At the same time, colleagues are repeatedly distracted from their actual work.
“A company’s knowledge is often not where it’s needed at the moment. Information is scattered across various sources, it's often unclear whether it is up to date, and experiential knowledge resides only in the minds of individual employees,” summarizes Franz Kögl, CEO of IntraFind Software AG. “Modern enterprise search provides a central point of access to this knowledge, while generative AI allows employees to retrieve information through a simple chat interface. AI also helps capture experiential knowledge in the first place: For example, employees can share their expertise by dictating it into a smartphone app, where it is automatically recorded and made searchable for others.”
