Why You Want to Capture What You Do and
How You Do It
By Dave Baldwin
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Risks of Uncertainty
As you navigate your way through this period of tumultuous
global economic challenge, you begin to understand the
enormous risks of uncertainty in everything you do.
A host of factors has come into play at this particular time that
leaves you unsure of what to do.
Faced with random, chaotic, disruptive events and trends,
working in enterprises large and small, you can arm yourself
against unpredictable threats.
Knowledge Assets
You can choose to develop, strengthen and put to work that
too often neglected, but critical, asset: the vast store of
knowledge that resides in your people, processes,
technologies, data and information.
Many organizations do capture knowledge of what they do and
how they do it, but often without an overarching strategy.
Fragments of organizational knowledge, such as process or
technology documentation, tend to be captured to meet
short-term needs.
Overlooked Opportunities
These isolated pieces of knowledge are often developed without
an awareness of how they connect and relate to other chunks
of knowledge in the organization.
Larger enterprises have made significant strides in how they
store their knowledge, but often the way these knowledge
stores are organized makes retrieving the information difficult
for those who need to use it.
Other enterprises, particularly smaller ones, rely on the tacit
knowledge of key individuals to operate. The advantages of
capturing core knowledge are overlooked when decisions are
made about how to use resources to accomplish work.
Priorities again favor short-term needs and goals. Captured
knowledge, in its variety of forms, is seen as superfluous, an
unnecessary luxury, to the central, day-to-day work of the
business.
The Value of What You Know
The value of developing explicit knowledge of what a
organization does and how it does it can address both external
and internal challenges. Businesses today need to be agile and
efficient.
While major productivity gains have been claimed based in the
implementation of new technologies, far better results can be
achieved when knowledge of how people, processes,
technologies, data and information work together is captured
and made widely available.
In many cases, this knowledge resides at lower levels of
organizations where it fails to receive the scrutiny it deserves.
Opportunities are lost because managers and executives are
not aware of what the organization, in total, knows.
Doing What You Do Better
Organizations can be far more effective when all stakeholders
have a firm grasp of what the business does, how it does it,
and what it intends to do in the future.
Within this context, people at all levels can better determine
what the organization needs to do to improve the way work
gets done to meet goals and objectives. Everyone becomes
better equipped to deal with the depth and rate of change
necessary to succeed.
Strategic Approach
Setting out on the path of capturing knowledge of what you do
and how you do it requires a broad strategy. You need to
develop a vision of how you can tell your story, both internally
and externally. You need to begin to see how the various parts
of your organization relate to each other.
Following this strategic vision, you need to set about doing the
work of capturing and making explicit your store of knowledge.
While you will need to give proper consideration to how you will
store and retrieve this knowledge easily, you also must give
particular emphasis to the quality of the content you are
capturing and making available.
Getting to the Bottom Line
To gain the full advantages of having knowledge of what you
do and how you do it at hand, you need to make sure you are
capturing the right information, at the right level of detail, for
the right audiences.
Captured knowledge, in the end, exists to help the people in
your organization do their work so your business can
successfully accomplish what it has set out to do.
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