The US Has An Urgent Need To Preserve Organizational Knowledge [Public-CIO] Monday 02/20/06 12:51 PM
According to Forrester Research, 46% of US government employees and 45% of US public employees are fast approaching retirement age. When these employees retire, their knowledge and expertise will retire with them unless organizations act now to preserve it. One way an organization can preserve this knowledge is by implementing an effective knowledge management mentoring program.
Knowledge management can be defined as the process of preserving, connecting and sharing the knowledge of an organization freely within the organization. When reliable knowledge is freely available throughout the organization, employees are more efficient, make fewer mistakes, avoid redundancy, communicate more effectively with their peers and can draw upon the skills and expertise of the entire organization.
An effective knowledge management procedure can preserve and maximize hard-won knowledge, lessons learned and best practices. It can also facilitate the connecting of mentors with mentees.
10 Steps To An Effective Knowledge Management Program:
- Identify High Risk Processes - These are areas that will be negatively impacted when the current expertise is gone.
- Take A User Centric Approach - The program should be available and accessible to the employees doing the jobs as opposed to just trainers or managers that would then filter it down to the employees that need it.
- Business Case Analysis proves the effectiveness of Knowledge Management - According to a 2005 IDC report, an average worker wastes 3.5 hours each week searching for information to do his/her job wasting an average of $5000 per year per employee.
- Build Consensus and Ownership - To get and maintain buy in from all the stake holders, get their input and feedback before, during and on a recurring basis.
- Find Out From The Employees On The Floor - The employees doing the job know what knowledge is needed to do the job. Get the knowledge from the source to avoid chasing slogans from management that sound good but are not followed in practice.
- Identify the experts and what their expertise is. Capture their expertise prior to their retirement using Exit Interviews, Mentoring Programs, and Job Shadowing.
- Connect People AND Collect Expertise. Preserving organizational knowledge requires the creation of groups of experts or Communities of Practice as well as capturing the process and procedure the experts employ.
- Help employees find the knowledge they need. One way this can be achieved is by organizing the knowledge in an easily accessible way to all employees. Storing knowledge in a tag based wiki like the wikipedia would allow employees to access and search the knowledge from many angles.
- Use Technology Judiciously - Technology is a very powerful tool to connect people with each other and with institutional knowledge. Implemented carefully it can enhance and improve your employee productivity. One way to find the proper tool for your organization is to connect with other organizations. Round table discussions between and across multiple organizations can ferret out best practices and best tools for mentoring and knowledge management.
- Develop metrics and usage statistics to measure your success.
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