Knowledge Harvesting or Retention of Corporate Knowledge:-
The greatest proportion of knowledge in an organisation resides in the heads and hearts of its people. Unfortunately these people leave and take their knowledge with them. Trying to suddenly gather this knowledge in the final month before a staff member leaves is probably a flawed process. As soon as a staff member realises he is being tapped for information, he will probably resist and do everything to sabotage the process. A method or company practice of harvesting at least some of that knowledge and experience is required.
Tacit knowledge is the unspoken or implied knowledge that is often an undercurrent of knowledge that runs through the company and which is generally accepted as being there. IT people communicate without even thinking about this understood but unstated knowledge. This is knowledge that cannot be captured.
Implicit knowledge is the similarly unspoken knowledge that is contained in a field of study or expertise but has the potential to be captured. It is embedded in the daily operation of the environment but takes someone with know-how to detect it and document it.
Explicit knowledge - has invariably been captured, is in plain sight and is unambiguous. Much of this knowledge is captured in technical descriptions and other supporting documents.
The knowledge capture exercise would therefore have to be a planned foray which used explicit knowledge as a reference point to gather some of the implicit and tacit knowledge that almost certainly exists and without which the company's specialist functions would never be achieved. The problem is who would do this? It would take a subject matter expert (SME) to be able to communicate with the source and understand the knowledge before being able to identify it.
So the exercise will not be a simple one.
One of the first and probably most elementary steps that the company should take is to document every employee's processes. Particularly where the employee has a mission critical job, a documented process will immediately indicate what types of specialist knowledge are being used and what additional types of knowledge are required to enable the use of the specialist knowledge. Undocumented processes in the company create many holes where the knowledge has the potential to leak from the organisation.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/5583623
Tacit knowledge is the unspoken or implied knowledge that is often an undercurrent of knowledge that runs through the company and which is generally accepted as being there. IT people communicate without even thinking about this understood but unstated knowledge. This is knowledge that cannot be captured.
Implicit knowledge is the similarly unspoken knowledge that is contained in a field of study or expertise but has the potential to be captured. It is embedded in the daily operation of the environment but takes someone with know-how to detect it and document it.
Explicit knowledge - has invariably been captured, is in plain sight and is unambiguous. Much of this knowledge is captured in technical descriptions and other supporting documents.
The knowledge capture exercise would therefore have to be a planned foray which used explicit knowledge as a reference point to gather some of the implicit and tacit knowledge that almost certainly exists and without which the company's specialist functions would never be achieved. The problem is who would do this? It would take a subject matter expert (SME) to be able to communicate with the source and understand the knowledge before being able to identify it.
So the exercise will not be a simple one.
One of the first and probably most elementary steps that the company should take is to document every employee's processes. Particularly where the employee has a mission critical job, a documented process will immediately indicate what types of specialist knowledge are being used and what additional types of knowledge are required to enable the use of the specialist knowledge. Undocumented processes in the company create many holes where the knowledge has the potential to leak from the organisation.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/5583623
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