Library clips :: February

February 1, 2009

Knowledge Retention will no longer be an explicit strategy

Filed under: km, network

Once again I have come across how it’s more important to cultivate conditions for knowledge creation and sharing over trying to manage knowledge or capture it a week before it walks out the door.

Actually I ranted about this on Tumblr the other day, starting off with:

“Following, “if only we knew what we know”, how about, “if only we could connect people to create knowledge that does not yet exist”

They both allude to a similar thing, but the actions of the second statement lead to fulfilling the first statement, and more.”

Firstly, I came across a post on knowledge retention by Arjun Thomas:

“This awareness in companies of how knowledge attrition affects then has prompted a large number of companies to institutionalize certain processes to capture as much knowledge from their employees as possible.”

“While a lot of these seem very useful a large percentage of companies find it difficult to measure the effectiveness they have […] so there are other ways around the problem. Identifying critical information areas and concentrating on these ensure that a higher quality of knowledge is recorded and retained instead of a “Jack of all trades - Master of none” approach.”

This doesn’t offer another way, but I do agree with the idea of pinpointing an issue and devoting efforts.

Now where we come into a new way, is simply social computing. Now social computing is not a strategy for “knowledge retention”, it just happens by default.

Actually in my mind creating conditions and facilitating social computing, can do away with, not terms, but strategies, like “knowledge transfer”, which is only going to happen in an environment where the receiver is able to re-contextualise the signal by way of probing and clarifying. It too helps when both parties know each other well, flow on the same wavelength, etc…this is best done in person, online synchronous methods, or asynchronously in an environment that mimics the offline world, such as an internal blogosphere or network.

We could even do away with “knowledge sharing” strategy as that just happens by default when you participate in social computing. The motivations are not altruistic sharing; but doing work, satisfying discourse (social connection), being heard and reputation.

What else have we got “knowledge inventory”, “knowledge map”, and “knowledge audit”, I like how Arjun differs this to a content audit (which may be more an information management thing of locating and mapping repositories and creating a federated search, navigable page, etc.) …social network analysis would tie into this…and it is a way to pinpoint essential areas to focus your social computing efforts. But still it feels that social computing would simply fill in all the cracks without you having to find them first.

I bet there are heaps more, what about a “knowledge capture” strategy, using concepts like “tacit knowledge” and “explicit knowledge”. To me explicit knowledge is just information, and tacit knowledge is just knowledge.

Now if you have a conversation with someone online or offline, as part of the transfer, whether you engage and can internalise that information, and reframe it to your way of looking at the world, it may become knowledge to you…this would be even more imprinted if you had to use it in a situation.
The fact that it was written down (supposedly explicit to tacit) or was in person (supposedly tacit to tacit) no longer means anything now that we have social computing…in one transaction I can use a blog (raw happenings) and comments to clarify, re-contextualise and get to know a person, and in the other I can do this in person…or a combination of both.

So I say, we have information, and we have knowledge.

If people can blog what they know as part of their job, this is great, we get these information nuggets that don’t appear in procedures, they are all the little things that are part of doing a job, that when added up are most valuable. (This is a fact of the knowledge age, the workers use their own know-how to do their jobs, and tapping into this and leaving a trail is handy for people you work with and for your successors).
I guess you could share knowledge this way, but the moment it leaves your mouth or mind, it’s up to the receiver to internalise this as knowledge, so for the time being the receiver sees it as information…what’s knowledge to one, is information to another…once they converse and re-frame, that information may come usable to the receiver even in a different way than the sender was using it.

The more we share raw fragments as they happen, connect and converse, the more we get to know each other, and can more easily absorb and learn.

Do we really need to use these phrases anymore in respect to direct strategies…at the moment I don’t think so? As far as I can see, they will just happen anyway.

Wow that was a massive tangent…anyway…secondly is a post by Christoph Schmaltz over at Headshift on knowledge retention the social computing way, here are some excerpts:

“Early efforts included conducting interviews or documenting everything the employee deemed to be important shortly before leaving the organization. I personally have not read any statistics (or even seen an ROI ) on how fruitful these efforts actually are. However, I can imagine that the success is rather limited, since there are various problems with such formal approaches:

* What is important to one person is not necessarily important to others.
* Most knowledge cannot be documented but is inherently connected to people.
* Questions and documents are inadequate to capture informal conversations or to make social connections visible.
* Given our short time span, it is very likely to miss important pieces of information when interviews are conducted.
* If an employee is laid off…”

“In short, relying only on formal approaches like the ones mentioned above will yield poor results when it comes to knowledge retention. I am not saying that these do not bring any benefit, but it should be clear that an organization needs to take a more holistic and especially timelier approach to knowledge retention. Holistic in the sense of being able to capture/transfer informal knowledge and timely meaning starting today and not when an employee is about to leave.”

“Instead of trying to document everything and controlling knowledge transfer, invest your efforts in facilitating knowledge networking. Allow employees to connect and interact with each other using simple tools. By doing so knowledge is naturally disseminated across the organization. In case an employee leaves the company, there are others that (most probably) carry parts of his work-related knowledge or know someone that knows.
In the end, this informal approach to knowledge retention could save the company considerable amounts of money, because people do not have to spend extra time for interviews / questionnaires etc. when leaving the company and new people can get up to speed much quicker, as they can rely on the help and knowledge of the other employees.”

“I believe that the notion of knowledge retention as a one-off activity in a distant future will soon disappear. Instead, organizations will need to find ways to make it part of employees’ day-to-day work”