Users need tools to help them filter and analyse increasingly large volumes of information and often they don’t have strong IT or data science skills. Still, they need tools to make advanced searches, get visual analytics and produce reports. And when it comes to policymakers and regular citizens, they expect highly interactive and engaging tools that provide good user experience.

Designing these tools and the underlying exploratory user experiences requires a deep understanding of the stakeholders — their specific language and jargon— and the workflows needed to process and rearrange information to create new data. Finding raw knowledge, which is often scattered across different organisations, each with their own “system of systems”, can be challenging.

Overall, there is a need to link data and information across various information systems and tools through a collaborative process, increasingly involving different types of expertise. That’s why knowledge management tools should serve users with different backgrounds, interests and mandates, and help them work together.