Establish Accountability - Set up Knowledge Management
So what the heck is knowledge management? You remember the super-cool project you worked on with all those great ideas four months ago? And how you were going to write down everything you learned, but never got around to it? Do you remember how frustrating it was when you faced similar challenges recently, and could remember that you overcame the challenges, but could not remember how? Welcome to knowledge management! It is one thing to solve a problem; it is something completely different to ensure that you and your organization do not reinvent the wheel over and over and over again. Stories are a great way to transfer knowledge, and it’s intrinsically human to want to get together and share with our friends, families and colleagues. In fact, colleagues sharing war stories over lunch may actually be sharing pearls of wisdom that would be unlikely to come up in formal meetings. Mentorships can be a great way to pass information from senior staff to new recruits, as can lunch-and-learns held on any topic a subject matter expert is willing to present. The challenge can be how to best capture information because most people are more than happy to contribute to a knowledge base but far less likely to actually mine it for information.
Almost everyone has a camera or video recorder built into their phone currently, so one way to start knowledge management is to simply setup a series of question-and-answer sessions with your experts and have them recorded. Now, granted, some people might not want to appear in front of the camera, but if you are the first to try this approach, others may be surprisingly willing to follow suit. Two of the last requirements before an intern would finish their internships at our company were that they were required to write a letter to the next intern, and to meet with our CIO. The first lets them document their experiences, and also provide words of wisdom for the next candidates and candidates down the line. The CIO interview gives them access to an executive before they go off to launch their own IT careers. The first serves our internal knowledge management process and helps us capture what it is like to intern here. The second hopefully arms them with a better understanding of the industry they are about to enter. These requirements are extremely easy to execute, but can add a huge amount of value.
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