Top tips for knowledge harvesting

On Friday, Sheetal left TFPL.  She worked with us for two and a half years and was a key member of the Blog Team.  We will miss her, but wish her the best in her new role.  Her departure gave us the opportunity to practise our knowledge harvesting capability.  Hopefully we won't be forced to pester her with too many phone calls as we should have captured her experience in a variety of ways before she left.

Ian Wooler, who leads our Knowledge Harvesting course shares his thoughts:

Knowledge harvesting is a KM technique that focuses on the capture and transfer of an individual's tacit knowledge into a more explicit format that can then be used by others.  This knowledge transfer is often completed when an individual is about to leave an organisation (exit interview) or moving (promotion) within an organisation and at times of team/project buildng and re-structuring.

The risk of knowledge loss is increasing in many organisations in part brought about by business drivers including: office relocation; merger/acquisition; downsizing; business process re-engineering and an ageing workforce.  It is now commonplace to see newspaper headlines referring to the 'fear of knowledge loss', 'brain drain' or the 'skills challenge'. 

So what can business managers do to help their organisations mitigate against these risks?  The starting point is to find answers to key questions, for example:

• what is the business driver?
• who is the customer for the knowledge?
• is the knowledge easily replaceable?
• what is the best method for capture?
• what are the best ways of making captured knowledge available and usable by others?
• what are the appropriate methods to assess success and re-use?