Enterprise Knowledge Vacuum

How to help enterprise to retain their knowledge and which in turn helps you manage more? Enterprises are already moving towards making knowledge more open, sharable and accessible. Knowledge needs to be collaborative, inter-operative and re-usable. Knowledge needs management. It has its own life - initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, controlling and its closing. An exceptionally unique attribute that needs nurturing to make it dynamic & long lasting. How do you proceed in your life, department, organization? Last year, one of the International NGOs hired me for consulting on managing knowledge in their organization. They use laptops and PCs, they use emails, web based free emails and everything know about about - fully computerized, very few things in hard copy documents. Most of their staffs are short-term contract employees. They join, work for few months as per contract and they leave. They write project reports and archived but always something is missing. After people leave organization, no way of accessing information in their laptops, personal emails, web based emails. Whatever available in organization network is all fragmented. Some information in emails, some other in PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint or on "Post-it" notes. They always have to compromise on information. Always everything starts all over again the same way. You see a big knowledge vacuum ahead.

Its a regular phenomenon that employees leave companies so often. Reasons may be different - in some cases they leave without notice. Employee turnover is always not a easy transformation. Many times you fire employees. Even so many times, you transfer employees to different departments, units, geographical locations (operations). And in many cases, employee roles are changed. In such cases, how do you transfer the knowledge of the employee to the new one who will take over his job. Do you train him from scratch? Does he need to start from level zero? Where should he start from? In most of the firms, people communicate using emails, IM, VOIP, cell or land line phones. Emails and IM can be recorded, but other forms of communications are not in regular practice to be recorded. Most of the communications, decisions, understandings are in the mind of the employee who makes deals. You must have faced this situation many times, and faced embarrassment in front of your clients, even possible your project crashed because of gap in knowledge transfer. When they leave your firm, you will face a big, big knowledge vacuum.

Wittingly or not, many companies are not taking serious attention to this part of the business aspects. Are you making the same mistake?

The training you impart to your employees, knowledge accumulated through day to day regular operations, solution found on difficult situations, experience on different cluster of customer relationships, the success cases, failure cases, indecisions, decisions, happenings, events, resolutions, reports, surveys, presentations, quotations, proposal, attorney notices, contacts, hot discussions, water cooler gossips, all are your invaluable assets. They are valuable now and in future. Do you have any way of accumulating and managing those knowledge of your employees? Over the years, the knowledge accumulated becomes a big asset for your company. Start managing enterprise wide knowledge from today. There are many software tools available for enterprise network and personal use.

Use one of such softwares and tools or develop your own system to organize the information, which helps you to harvest knowledge for long run. You can use one of CRM software, Enterprise wide collaboration suites, Wiki based Intranets. Look out semantic technology based document and knowledge management systems. Start Intranet based blog systems to capture knowledge of your staff daily. Blogging is one of the latest approach to record your knowledge, aspirations, and anything. You can tag your knowledge posts by as many relevant subject areas as you want. There are many other proprietary and open source software applications available to assist you for this, select one or develop yourself as per your enterprise need. It would be effective if you give environment to express openly and transparently.

The exigency of today's enterprises is the capability to organize, manage, share knowledge, make it re-usable, accessible to peers and always be ready with required information. Start tagging your knowledge in corporate network from today.

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