Know-how Management – Capturing And Structuring Understanding Into Reusable Assets
Several organizations have an strategy for identifying and recording lessons discovered, maybe as part of a post-project critique or comparable procedure. Unfortunately, lessons discovered reports have a tendency to finish up on a shelf gathering dust, or lost in the un-chartered corner of a fileserver somewhere. Let’s get genuine. How several people will really trawl diligently by way of a quantity of lessons learned documents in order to glean some key point? The reality is, if you can motivate workers to initiate any type of “understanding ahead of performing” activity, then you?re performing pretty well.
Remember the last time you packed your bag in preparation for a company trip?
Knowledge Management System require to bear in mind? tickets, passport, currency, itinerary, get in touch with, driving license, energy adaptor, Ipod?
We handle to bear in mind the factors we require for our business trips without having going through every single past suitcase-packing experience in our minds, a single by one particular. Somehow, we preserve a meta-level list in our memories. And however, when it comes to lessons discovered, we expect individuals in our organizations to work believed a pile of lessons discovered reports in the hope that a crucial insight will leap out at them?
We have to have to come across ways to package expertise into effortlessly accessible “expertise assets” – structured with a buyer in thoughts.
The measures below are taken from the very best-promoting fieldbook “Mastering to Fly – Sensible knowledge management from top and finding out organisations”, written by Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell. They don’t require sophisticated, bespoke technologies just a wilingness to assume-by means of and structure what has been discovered.
1. Recognize a customer for this know-how. Have a clear buyer – current or future – in mind when contemplating the creation of a know-how asset.
two. Get clear what your understanding asset is actually about. What is the scope of your information asset? A understanding asset requirements to cover a specific location of enterprise activity.
three. Recognize a neighborhood of practice relating to this topic. The community will be the source of the know-how initially, the customers of the know-how in instant term, and the men and women who have an on-going responsibility for validating the future contents of in the understanding asset. This is essential ? or there is a genuine threat that you will end up with an electronic time capsule – a snapshot in time of the way things used to be performed – rather than the current, prized know-how in your organisation.
four. Collate any existing material upon which you can base your expertise asset and appear for common recommendations. Offer some context so that men and women can fully grasp the purpose and relevance of the knowledge asset. Are there common suggestions that you can distil out of this material?
five. Develop a checklist illustrated with examples and stories. The checklist should really inform the user of the information asset:
“What are the queries I have to have to ask myself?”
“What are the actions that I want to take?”
Illustrate it with examples, stories, pictures, digital photographs, models, quotes, video and audio clips if feasible.
six. Consist of links to persons. Build a hyperlink to the person’s private dwelling page or e-mail address wherever you mention them in the text. Involve a list of all the men and women with any partnership with the content. Use thumbnail photographs if you have them obtainable.
7.Validate the Recommendations Circulate the suggestions about the community once more, and ask “Do the suggestions accurately reflect your knowledge and practical experience?” “Do you have something to add?”
8. Publish the information asset. Retailer the understanding in a space where it can be accessed by its neighborhood. Often this will imply the firm intranet.
9. Initiate a feedback and ownership method. Encourage feedback from users, so that they choose up and eliminate any invalid suggestions. Instil a sense of obligation that “if you use it, then you ought to add to it”.
Over time, you are going to make up a series of expertise assets which relate to the essential practices in your organisation ? the regions which can bring competitive benefit. The creation of these tangible expertise assets provides a focus for the communities of practice connected with every a single, and ultimately will give credibility to your understanding management efforts.