What is knowledge management and why does your organization need it?

What is knowledge management?

Knowledge management is the practice of capturing, organizing, and sharing the information your business creates every day.

That includes:

• Documents, templates, and wikis
• Past decisions and policies
• Institutional know-how from conversations, tools, and meetings

Done well, KM supports:

• Productivity: Less duplicate work
• Content reuse: More ROI on every asset
• Decision-making: Access to historical context
• Collaboration: Shared knowledge across roles

And it’s not just for IT or documentation teams. All teams, including sales, support, HR, and marketing all benefit when knowledge flows freely—and securely.

Why knowledge management matters more than ever

Work moves fast. People change roles. Tools pile up. Without a knowledge management (KM) strategy, what your team knows gets buried—and it shows.

Fragmented knowledge leads to lost time, missed deadlines, and reduced momentum. Let’s explore what happens when KM falls through the cracks.

Teams are wasting time searching and duplicating work

When knowledge is hard to find, work slows down. People spend hours hunting for answers, recreating content, or pinging teammates for help.

• Knowledge workers spend up to 20% of their week just searching for information or redoing work
• That leads to:
  • Missed deadlines
  • Frustrated teams
  • Unnecessary rework

With KM in place, answers are a click away—and teams stay focused on what matters.

Institutional knowledge is walking out the door

When employees leave or shift teams, they take critical know-how with them. Without a system to capture that knowledge, it’s lost.

• Onboarding slows down
• Context disappears
• Progress stalls

KM keeps expertise in reach—so teams can pick up where others left off, not start from scratch.

Scattered content is creating confusion and inconsistency

Outdated decks, misaligned templates, and duplicate files create chaos. When teams can’t find the right version, trust breaks down and decisions stall.

• Content lives in too many places
• Teams use different sources of truth
• Work gets duplicated—or worse, done wrong

KM brings order to the chaos. Everyone sees the same information, uses the same templates, and moves forward together.

What makes a knowledge management system effective?

An effective knowledge management (KM) system helps teams move faster by making the right information easy to capture, find, and share—securely.

The most impactful systems focus on four things:

• Making knowledge easy to collect
• Ensuring it’s discoverable across teams and tools
• Supporting reuse and continuity
• Protecting information through smart access controls

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Capture and structure: Make it easy to contribute

Knowledge flows through conversations, meetings, docs, and tools. A good KM system makes it simple to gather insights from anywhere and keep them organized. With smart tagging and intuitive structure, your team can share what they know—without slowing down.

It’s especially useful for fast-moving teams that rely on Slack threads, ad-hoc meetings, or shared docs—places where critical information often gets lost.

Access and searchability: Help people find what matters

When information is buried or scattered, work slows down. Search should work across platforms and accounts so people can get what they need, when they need it—regardless of tool or team. The right KM setup surfaces relevant, trusted content quickly, saving time and reducing duplicate effort.

That means no more switching between apps, digging through folders, or asking around for the latest version. Search should feel effortless—like it already knows what you’re looking for.

Governance and control: Keep knowledge safe and aligned

Teams need access, but not to everything. Built-in permissions and admin controls help balance visibility with protection. With the right governance, you can keep knowledge secure without limiting collaboration.

Whether you’re handling sensitive HR records, financial data, or early product concepts, role-based access helps you manage risk while still keeping workflows smooth. And when priorities shift, admins can adjust settings without disrupting the flow of work.

How Dropbox Dash brings knowledge management to life

Dropbox Dash turns knowledge management from a project into a workflow. When work is moving fast, Dash helps your team keep up, by making knowledge easy to find, share, and act on.

Help your team find what they already know

Universal search and Dash Chat connect all your apps, so answers are always a click away. Instead of switching between tabs or pinging teammates, teams can surface exactly what they need—whether it lives in Slack, Gmail, Drive, or Notion.

Whether it’s a doc from last week or a decision made last month, Dash surfaces what your team needs in seconds. Information moves with your team, not against them.

Turn scattered content into reusable knowledge

Dash stacks help you group files, links, and templates by project, team, or task—so everything lives where it’s needed. Marketing can pull in past campaign assets. Sales can align on the latest pitch materials. Ops can build out process guides.

It’s flexible, fast, and keeps work organized without adding more tools to the mix.

Keep knowledge shareable—but still secure

The Dash admin console gives teams control over who can view, edit, or reuse content—without slowing things down. Whether you’re onboarding new hires or sharing a proposal with sales, it’s easy to collaborate without compromising security.

Access is easy to manage, controls stay in place, and nothing slips through the cracks.

Knowledge management in action: How teams put Dash to work

Knowledge is flowing through every conversation, doc, and tool your team uses. Dash helps bring that scattered information together—making it easier to pick up where others left off, without chasing down context.

Here’s how that plays out across key workflows:

Onboarding new team members

New hires shouldn’t have to dig through outdated folders or ask around to get started. Dash gives them access to the policies, playbooks, and past work they need—organized by role or team.

Whether it’s an intro deck, a process doc, or a campaign archive, they can find what matters and get moving faster.

Aligning sales and marketing teams

When teams work from different versions of messaging, assets, or data, alignment breaks down. Dash helps sales and marketing teams stay on the same page—by keeping content, campaign insights, and frameworks in one place.

Everyone pulls from the same source, so teams stay in sync and campaigns stay on track.

Enabling self-service for customer-facing teams

Support, Success, and CX teams rely on past context to move quickly. Dash helps them access previous tickets, product documentation, and internal notes without looping in a specialist.

With fewer blockers and clearer context, teams respond faster, reduce escalations, and spend less time chasing down answers.

Frequently asked questions

What is knowledge management in simple terms?

Knowledge management is how an organization captures, organizes, and shares what it already knows—so people can make faster decisions without starting from scratch. It’s about turning information into something teams can actually use.

What are the key types of knowledge in a business?

Businesses rely on different types of knowledge:

• Explicit—documented information like files, reports, and guides
• Tacit—personal experience, intuition, or skills learned on the job
• Implicit—unwritten know-how, like how things get done in practice

What makes a knowledge management system effective?

An effective knowledge management system is:

• Easy to use and adopt
• Fully searchable across tools
• Secure and well-governed
• Integrated into daily workflows—not added on top

It should help teams find and reuse knowledge without slowing them down.

How does Dash support knowledge management?

Dash brings scattered content together so teams can find what they need, fast. It supports knowledge management with:

• Universal search across all your tools
• Stacks to organize content by project, team, or workflow
• Admin console that helps keep sharing secure and controlled

Dash turns everyday work into reusable knowledge—without adding complexity.

Help your team do more with what they already know

Don’t let valuable knowledge slip through the cracks. Empower your team to do more with what they already know by implementing an effective knowledge management strategy with Dash.

Explore features that bring knowledge management to life