Why AI Needs Knowledge Management to Succeed

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🎙️ FULL SHOW NOTES
https://www.microsoftinnovationpodcast.com/701

What happens when AI meets the messy, human world of organizational knowledge? In this episode, Rebecka Isaksson—Microsoft MVP and knowledge management strategist—unpacks how AI can finally unlock the elusive value of tacit knowledge. From SharePoint sprawl to the power of communities of practice, Rebecka shares hard-won insights on transforming content chaos into enterprise intelligence. Whether you're navigating Microsoft 365 or scaling AI in your organization, this conversation will change how you think about knowledge, governance, and impact.
 
🔑KEY TAKEAWAYS
AI needs knowledge management: Without governance and lifecycle thinking, AI can’t deliver sustainable value in enterprise environments.
Tacit knowledge is the real gold: AI tools like Microsoft Copilot can now surface insights from informal conversations, chats, and communities—not just documents.
SharePoint’s hidden risks: Without role-based access control (RBAC), SharePoint can become a security and governance liability in AI-driven organizations.
Communities of practice scale expertise: Platforms like Microsoft Engage (not just Yammer) are critical for capturing and sharing real-time, experience-based knowledge.
Governance must evolve: Organizations need to move from content management to true knowledge management—governing not just files, but conversations, videos, and more.
 
🧰 RESOURCES MENTIONED
👉 Microsoft 365 Copilot – AI-powered productivity assistant: https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/microsoft-365/copilot
👉 Knowledge Fika - https://open.spotify.com/show/0X7STHKKiIEEj1nrd9hvQa?si=d6fd17b395f749ec
👉 Microsoft MVP YouTube Series - How to Become a Microsoft MVP - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzf0yupPbVkqdRJDPVE4PtTlm6quDhiu7

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Thanks for listening 🚀 - Mark Smith

Episode Transcript

Mark Smith (00:06):
Welcome to the MVP show.
My intention is that you listento the stories of these MVP
guests and are inspired tobecome an MVP and bring value to
the world through your skills.
If you have not checked it outalready, I do a YouTube series
called how to Become an MVP.
The link is in the show notes.
With that, let's get on withthe show.

(00:31):
Today's guest joins me fromStockholm, Sweden.
She's a founder of KnowledgeManagement Expert at NoFlow
Value and was first awarded herMicrosoft MVP in 2024.
That's after working forMicrosoft for 15 odd years.
She's known for drivingsignificant business value

(00:52):
through Microsoft 365.
You can find links to her bioand socials in the show notes
for this episode.
Welcome to the show, Rebecka.

Rebecka Isaksson (01:00):
Hi Mark.
Thank you, I'm very excited tobe here.
I'm usually on the other sideof the microphone, so tell me
about your podcast.
Yeah, it's called KnowledgeFika.
I'm not sure if you're familiarwith the concept of Swedish
fika.

Mark Smith (01:17):
No, tell me.

Rebecka Isaksson (01:20):
It's similar to what Americans would refer to
as water cooler conversations.
Right Back in the day it usedto be in most offices you had a
10 o'clock in the morning coffeebreak and you had a three
o'clock in the afternoon coffeebreak when people would just
stop working, go to the breakroom, you know, sit down and

(01:42):
have casual conversations,sometimes work related most of
the time not, but it was also,you know, I know my colleagues.
When I moved to America, when Imoved to Redmond, they were
kind of laughing at this andthey said so that's just you
slacking off work, right,getting paid to have coffee.

Mark Smith (02:02):
And I'm like.

Rebecka Isaksson (02:03):
Well, you know what it's actually more than
that, because those casualconversations you connect with
people on a personal level andthat has some magic effects on
working relationships.
You make new connections, youmeet new people, you realize
that you have common challengesor common solutions in different

(02:24):
departments and you know itbecomes very creative and
innovative and also it's verygood for morale and well-being.
So me and an American woman wholives in Sweden since many
years got connected on LinkedInbecause she said she reached out

(02:44):
to me and she said, oh my God,I'm so excited there's another
knowledge management person inthis country.
Wow, we should connect.
So we had an informal coffeeand then, you know, the rest is
history.
We started doing this podcastand you know, similar to this
one like fireside chat, casualconversation, talking to

(03:05):
interesting profiles fromMicrosoft, from Microsoft
partners and, you know, mostlycentered around knowledge
management, ai or thecombination of those.

Mark Smith (03:19):
So interesting, particularly the.
I want to understand the factthat you've had such a long
tenure in SharePoint, and I'veseen some stuff around AI,
document automation thatMicrosoft's talked about in
recent years.
Then there's, you know,organizations that have a

(03:43):
tremendous amount of datasitting in their SharePoint
environments, and now alongcomes AI and, to make sense of
it all, what are you seeing iskind of, where are these
technologies merging?
Now?
What are you kind of seeing dayto day where AI and then
knowledge management is startingto cross over?

Rebecka Isaksson (04:07):
Well, I think that AI needs knowledge
management, not necessarily allthe dry academic theoretical
frameworks and you knowprocesses and things like that,
but the foundational principlesof knowledge management, because
that's all about how we govern,how we manage lifecycle.

(04:32):
A lot of people unfortunatelysay the words knowledge
management but what they'reactually talking about is
content management or actuallyeven document management.
Right, but knowledge managementis more than that, because we
have this whole body of what'scalled tacit knowledge where,

(04:56):
first of all, I think AI and thecapabilities we have now in
M365, with AI reasoning over somuch more of the knowledge in
our organization than justwhat's formalized in a document,
it can really help some of theproblems that knowledge managers

(05:17):
have battled from, you know,the very beginning about 30
years ago, when knowledgemanagement started evolving as
an art and a science.
But I also think that thereverse applies AI can help
knowledge managers and knowledgemanagement solve problems.
But AI, to be super efficientand for organizations to reap

(05:43):
the benefits and get a fasterROI, knowledge management
principles are needed, but itneeds to be expanded and we need
to shift our focus, I think, inthis space from enterprise
content management to enterpriseknowledge management.
We need governance.
We need governance, we needlifecycle, we need RBACs or

(06:05):
role-based access controls onthe less tangible assets as well
Our chats, our videos, ouraudio, all of that, email
calendars, even right.
We need to think governance andlifecycle in much broader terms
.

Mark Smith (06:22):
But you mentioned RBAC and you know, know, I've
done presentations where I talkabout sharepoint's lack of rbac
and um and therefore being arisk vector inside an
organization, particularly in anai driven world.
How do you talk about uh, youknow, rbac from a sharepoint
point of view?

Rebecka Isaksson (06:41):
yeah, I guess I have to be careful now because
I don't want to lose my statusas SharePoint MVP, right.
But no, I'm just kidding.
Security permissions inSharePoint is not easy for the
most experienced of us, right,and there are people who are on
the deeper, technical level alot more.

(07:02):
You know a lot better and moreexperienced than I am on that,
because I've always kept more atthe business value, solving
business problems, thefunctional, that's my you know
niche.
So it is convoluted and it iscomplex and it is complex.

(07:23):
But if you don't have any kindof you know, roles and
responsibilities matrix in yourorganization, you can't really
have the governance, you won'tbe able to control it.
The sharing links is probablythe biggest course of that,
because a lot of organizationsdo not think through who can

(07:48):
create a site, who can share asite, who can share what
document library, et cetera.
So they grow organically andyou have, all of a sudden, you
have this forest of sharinglinks right, left and center,
orphan sites, with what weusually call site sprawl and
things like that, which is alsocaused to some extent by the

(08:11):
fact that organizations don'tunderstand what happens in
SharePoint on the back end everytime you create a new team.
Right, so it's.
But not to say that that's, youknow, the fault of SharePoint

(08:33):
or SharePoint design flaw.
I think it's in human nature.
We're very good at squirrelingthings away, but we're not very
good at tidying up and throwingout.
It's you know?
I just moved into a new house ayear ago and for six months
before we moved I said to myhusband you know the 20 boxes

(08:53):
you have in the attic that hasstuff since you were 17 years
old.
Please go through and cleanthem out.
What happens in the end whenyou move houses?
Well, the night before themovers come, you realize you
haven't even gotten to thoseboxes yet, so you move them from
one attic to the next.
Organizations do the same withcontent.
Cleaning up, organizing, it'snot fun do the same with content

(09:18):
.

Mark Smith (09:18):
Cleaning up, organizing it's not fun, and,
after all, it is calledSharePoint.
It was intended for sharinginformation inside the
organization.
I'm keen, though, to get anexplanation from you, because
I've not gotten any experiencein this area.
You talked about the differencebetween content management and
knowledge management.
How do you explain it?

Rebecka Isaksson (09:33):
The content management side is the explicit
knowledge, the tangible assets,where we've codified or, you
know, most cases.
We usually refer to it as theknowledge that people carry

(10:02):
around in their heads, which isactually experience, more so
than traditional knowledge thatwe've absorbed through education
or through reading books, etcetera.
It's the know-how that we getfrom repeatedly doing something,
learning from our mistakes, etcetera, and that's very hard to

(10:25):
capture.
Well, this is where, sometimes,I have a little bit of a debate,
shall we say, a politedisagreement, with some of the
very leading, most prominentexperts in the field of

(10:47):
knowledge management, who arguethat you can't codify tacit
knowledge because once you writethese things down, they're no
longer knowledge.
They are now static assets thatare subject to interpretation
by the reader.
They become information, and Iagree with that.

(11:10):
What I mean when I saycodifying tacit knowledge is not
to write it down, to transcribeit, but what I mean is that AI
has the capability to draw frominformation, whether it's in an
engaged community conversation,whether it's a team chat or a

(11:33):
team channel right chat or ateam channel right, so we can
pull the nuggets out of thoseconversations best answers in
Engage, for instance and it willincorporate that, as it
generates new content for you.
So that's a way of codifyingthe tac set without killing the

(11:56):
knowledge that turning it intoinformation so, so interesting.

Mark Smith (12:01):
I I used to work for a company that started with I
and ended with m, and you knowthey worked on some big you know
um, you're talking about hownow now right, yeah some big
petroleum-type customers rightthat extract oil, petroleum and
things like that.
And one of the things that theyfound with AI coming up about is

(12:25):
that sometimes these systemshad been built 50 years ago but
they'd been built by engineerswho have a massive attention to
detail and to writing notes andthings, and so they're able to
extract all these schematics andthings of, let's say, a massive
oil rig, feed that in when thisoil rig was now having
challenges and those peopleobviously no longer work for the

(12:48):
company, they're retired,they're gone, et cetera.
But with AI I was able to bringdown that jot on the blueprint
to oh note.
This was able to bring that allto life and it was kind of it
was tacit knowledge in that itwas you had to know it because
you were there, type thing.
But because of those notes now,50 years later, had a whole new

(13:12):
lease of life and created awhole new level of value for the
organization to be able to moveforward and, and you know, fix
these things for the, thecurrent engineers that never had
that connection, but that was aan organization obviously that
was built around engineering andand, by nature, codifying into

(13:33):
drawings and things like thatinformation.
That's not most companies.

Rebecka Isaksson (13:39):
No, it's not right.
And especially not if you lookat, you know, organisations that
predominantly consist ofknowledge workers.
Right, engineering, these typesof things.
Because there's formulas,there's structure, there's you
know, procedures, it's thingsare very well defined.

(14:06):
When you're in a knowledgeworker organization, let's say a
professional services, aconsulting organization, right,
things are not that cookiecutter, so cookie cutter.
So there's where you have ahuge value from tacit knowledge.
One of the I mean one of thepredominant vehicles and

(14:28):
actually one of the core pillarsin knowledge management
academia is communities ofpractice.
So communities in Engage,basically, right, engage was and
it's a pet peeve of mine whenpeople say Engage aka Yammer,
because Engage and Yammer arenight and day, right platform

(14:57):
for communities of practice,which we're now seeing, which
would all the improvements thatare made, all the new features
around subject matter, experts,sme approved answers, et cetera,
and how CoPilot will actuallyput more weight on an answer in
Engage that has been given thecheck mark of SME approved or
best answer, right.
So that's been the only way toreally scale tacit knowledge and

(15:25):
exchange and what it is.
It's conversations like these,right?
When I worked at MicrosoftConsulting Services in Redmond
for Global HQ, I was part of theoffice of the CTO and we ran
the knowledge managementincluding content and
collaboration platform, built onSharePoint, of course, and the

(15:48):
communities of practice, and wehad around 105 different
communities of practice.
We had over a thousandcommunity leads and SMEs and, on
average, we would have between43 and 45,000 unique members
engaged a month, right Monthover month, in these communities

(16:13):
.
So they were an incredible way.
For, you know, a consultant isworking on client side.
They might not even have accessto their own laptop, they can't
access any of the knowledgebases or resources in the
Microsoft tenant, so but whatthey could do was they could
always throw out a question tothe relevant community and we

(16:38):
measured all of this.
We had a lot of data.
We measured response times,number of responses, all of
these things, and we saw thatmost of the time when somebody
asked a community for help witha customer problem, they would
get collateral.
They would get detailedrecommendations and instructions
of how to tackle a certainproblem within minutes.

(16:59):
So you know that drove upcustomer satisfaction, but it
also helped the consultant whowas battling a certain problem
that they hadn't encounteredbefore.
They learned.
So now they could be a better.
You know they could providemore value for the next
engagement and so forth.

(17:32):
But it's very hard to motivateto certain.
You indirect and there's aripple effect over time.
Because even if 80% of thecommunity members never
participate and share or askquestions, they're reading these
conversations, they're seeingthe collateral that's being
shared.
It's hard to quantify, but nowwe have Copilot, for instance,

(18:01):
that can actually help pull outthese nuggets and incorporate
that in content that is then,you know, created and widely
distributed.
So you can now all of a suddenscale this.
It's still hard to measure, butyou can really start scaling
tacit knowledge sharing andtacit knowledge exchange.

Mark Smith (18:15):
You can really start scaling, tacit knowledge
sharing and tacit knowledgeexchange.
I like that.
I've learned a lot.
Tell me, how did you become anMVP, like?
You've obviously been inMicrosoft for a long time?
Were you aware of the MVPprogram when you were in
Microsoft, or were you moreaware of it when you came out of
Microsoft?
And I know that you went in andout of Microsoft a few times?
But how did becoming an MVP atthis time come about for you?

Rebecka Isaksson (18:40):
well, yeah, I left in October 18 because I
wanted to go back to Sweden for,for personal reasons, family,
friends, etc.
Um.
So I left the company for ashort while, but very quickly.
Within six months I was askedto come back to work for product
marketing in M365 on this newand exciting AI product Project

(19:03):
Cortex, which became Syntex andBeaver Topics.
So I was aware of the MVPprogram at that point.
I didn't know about it for myfirst 12 years but when I was in
product marketing because, aswe were preparing the product
for general availability orproducts as it became, we worked

(19:27):
very closely with the MVPcommunity and we had MVPs who
worked for organizations thatwere part of several private
previews that you know work veryclosely with marketing and with
engineering to refine and finetune and perfect the product
before they were released.

(19:48):
So I was aware of it.
I never thought of it myselfthat, you know, I should try to
become an MVP, but because I'm acommunities person at heart, I
enjoy helping people, I enjoysharing my expertise and

(20:11):
experience, not necessarilyexpecting a return for it, and
that's why I publish so much onLinkedIn and share so much on
LinkedIn, for instance, becauseI like to contribute to the
bigger community.
So I started speaking at thesedifferent events like we have in
Europe and North America collabdays, for instance, which used

(20:32):
to be SharePoint Saturday.
So I started, you know,speaking at some of these and I
met some of the MVP OGs, as theycall them, some of the folks
that's been in this.
Eric Ships is one of them theSharePoint cowboy.
You might have heard of him oryour listeners were into
SharePoint, probably know who heis and Sue Hanley and Mark

(20:53):
Anderson and all these guys.
And that's how the idea cameabout, because some of them said
, you know, we should probablynominate you because we actually
need more people that has thebusiness value, business problem
focus, and not only thetechnical experts, developers,

(21:15):
admins, right.
So I just and I thought, well,okay, that would be nice, but
you know it was still so I.
That's how it came about.
I just started attending more ofthese Collab Days events and
speaking at all these things andthen someone in the UK

(21:37):
nominated me after the CollabDays, bletchley Park last year
and yeah, and it was approved.
So I was very of your listeners.
I feel like 15 years as anemployee.

(22:01):
I've never had as much impactand close interactions and
conversations with Microsoftengineering than I do as an MVP,
and I'm very humbled by thatfact, but I also thrive on it.
It really motivates me becausemy personality is just I like to

(22:23):
have an impact.
I'm an impact junkie, you know.
Impact and influence forimprovement, making things
better, is kind of what makes mejump out of bed in the morning.

Mark Smith (22:36):
Hey, thanks for listening.
I'm your host businessapplication MVP Mark Smith,
otherwise known as the NZ365 guy.
If you like the show and wantto be a supporter, check out
buymeacoffeecom forward slashNZ365 guy.
Thanks again and see you nexttime.
Thank you.