More companies are going remote than ever. It makes sense from a lot of angles. Remote workers can enjoy the comfort of home and avoid commuting and companies can save a lot of money on overhead like office space, utilities, and other expenses. However, that doesn’t mean remote work is perfect. Remote organizations have their own set of challenges. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t solutions to these obstacles. In today’s blog, we’ll talk about how to share data knowledge in a remote organization and how a central data repository can help. Read on to learn more.

What Is Data Knowledge Management?

Data knowledge management allows your team to organize, search, and share company information and data. Good data knowledge management makes it simpler for your team to access and use company data at all times. It empowers data literacy in your company and allows employees to make more data-driven decisions on their own.

Companies can construct their own data knowledge management strategy and solution or they can utilize solutions to help them. Generally, it’s easier to use a data management solution that works well with your data stack. This is a much simpler and more effective path to making data knowledge more accessible for your remote team.

Before diving into data knowledge management tips and solutions, let’s talk about some of the primary issues that remote teams face when it comes to data knowledge and data sharing.

Common Issues Remote Teams Face

As mentioned, remote work is often preferable for employees and companies for a number of reasons. However, ease of communication is not necessarily one of these reasons. Being able to communicate in-office is a much more direct, shorthand way to solve a problem with a team member. Knowledge sharing is much more dispersed in a remote setting. 

Since remote teams have employees in various different locations, using different devices and working on their own, information and data can get spread out and siloed. If someone needs specific data or information, they may have to work harder to track it down remotely, whereas in-office they could simply walk over to team members who know where to find it.

Let’s break down some of the issues that remote teams face in more detail:

• No in-person interactions - As mentioned, remote workers don’t have that same in-person familiarity with their co-workers as office workers do. This means that employees may not get to collaborate as easily with each other and employees may be intimidated to reach out to employees they don’t know that well with data questions. This can be partially solved through communication platforms like Zoom and Slack, but the lack of direct interactions can certainly cause inefficiencies.
• Onboarding - Onboarding new team members can be difficult to do remotely. Training has to take place entirely through employee portals, modules, and remote communication channels. While it’s doable, it can get confusing when it comes to data knowledge management. Learning all of the data sources and making sure they know where to look for the data they need can be overwhelming for new employees if the data is spread out and disorganized.
• Data silos - When data is spread out through remote teams, it’s easy for it to become siloed to one department’s tools and platforms that another department can’t reach. Since these other team members may be unaware of the data’s existence, it can cause inaccuracies and missed opportunities. Teams need solutions that can centralize their data and enable easy collaboration to avoid this siloing.
• Data quality - Data siloing can also dramatically affect the quality of data. This means that data may be inaccurate, incomplete, inconsistent, or unreliable. When your data is disorganized, your teams can run into data errors, duplicate data, and other inconsistencies that slow down work and cause confusion. These interruptions in your knowledge flow can lead to unproductive teams and affect employee morale. When teams are constantly dealing with data issues, they’ll be less empowered to make data-driven decisions, they’ll put more work on the data teams, and they’ll become burnt out due to the frustration of working with low-quality data.

Fortunately, these issues can be overcome with good knowledge sharing practices and the right data knowledge management solutions. Let’s take a look at some of the best tips for improving knowledge sharing in your organization.

Tips To Improve Your Knowledge Sharing

Every remote organization should strive to improve their knowledge sharing and make it as easy as possible for remote teams to collaborate and use data. Here are some good tips for improving knowledge sharing in your organization:

• Build a knowledge sharing culture - From the beginning, you should be fostering a knowledge-sharing culture in your company. You want your teams to know that collaboration is encouraged. Of course, to build a knowledge-sharing culture, you need to make sure you lay out a comprehensive strategy and process for accessing and sharing knowledge. This brings us to our next point.
• Create a knowledge sharing process - Make sure your teams have a clear outline for how knowledge and data should be shared and accessed. Have tools and platforms in place to make this easier for them. If you want your teams to share knowledge and be on the same page, you need to make sure they have the right resources to do so. This brings us to our last tip.
• Utilize a central data repository - Perhaps the simplest way to ensure that your teams have quality data and are able to share and collaborate is by implementing a central data repository. A central data repository puts all of your data in one place and solves a lot of the issues that remote teams face with data management.

Let’s take a look at some of the biggest benefits that a central data repository provides.

Benefits of Using a Central Data Repository

A central data repository has almost become a necessity for remote organizations. With the amount of data siloing that can happen in a remote company, you need to make sure everyone has the same access to data and that everyone is seeing the same data points. Here are some of the primary benefits of using a central data repository.

Easier Onboarding

Bringing on new employees becomes a simpler process. Instead of onboarding your team members and having to teach them various different data tools and how to share and search data with other teams, you just have to teach them how to use the central data repository.

Enhance Communication and Collaboration

Communication and collaboration are much easier when everyone is on the same page. As mentioned, remote organizations often deal with disorganized and siloed data. When teams try to work together, they could easily be seeing different teams, making collaboration much more difficult. Not only does this lead to frustration and confusion, but it slows down the flow of work.

With a central data repository, all of your team members will see the same data. When data is updated by one team, all of the other teams will have the updated data. No more disorganized data and no more data silos.

Make Data Accessible and Searchable

A central data repository allows anyone on your team to access and search the company data they need. This leads to improved data literacy in your organization, more data-driven decisions, and more confidence for nontechnical users to utilize the data on hand. This also means fewer requests are sent to the data team and fewer data request bottlenecks slowing down work.

Ensure Data Is Accurate and Reliable

With a central data repository, you can trust your data to be more accurate and reliable. When all of your data is going into one place, you get more complete and consistent data and fewer duplicates and other errors. Standardizing your data across all data sources will make all of your teams more efficient and ensure they can always get the right data.

Try Secoda for free

If you’re looking for a solution for data knowledge management, choose Secoda. Our modern data catalog tool makes it easy for your teams to manage, search, and discover data. Our platform can consolidate all of your data into a central repository, solving many of the problems that remote teams face.

Additionally, Secoda makes it extremely easy and intuitive to search company data. Both data teams and non-technical users can easily search and find the data they need. This makes data infinitely more accessible for your team. With Secoda, data sharing and collaboration also becomes much simpler and more intuitive. Interested in learning more about Secoda and how it can benefit your team? Try Secoda for free today and get in touch for more information about our platform.