Continuity Management: Preserving Corporate Knowledge and Productivity When Employees Leave

Chapter 8. Designing the Knowledge Profile

What do we need to know in our jobs and when do we need to know it?

What is the essential knowledge that makes us productive in our positions at WedgeMark?

What knowledge is critical, what knowledge is merely helpful, and what knowledge is tangential?

And, as one of the more eccentric members of our team put it, if you discovered that your house of knowledge was on fire, what knowledge would you choose to save?

These were the questions we asked each other as we wrestled with categorizing operational knowledge and developing a means to harvest and transfer it. They led us to the conclusion that the process of knowledge harvesting and transfer has three components:

• A means for identifying critical operational knowledge and organizing it into knowledge categories

• A methodology for harvesting the critical operational knowledge from incumbent employees

• A "container" to store the critical operational knowledge and transfer it to the successor employee

We began with the container, which was the third component, because it described the knowledge categories that set the objectives for the knowledge harvest. Andre had already called it the knowledge profile.

The challenge of designing the profile was intriguing because none of us had ever systematically examined our operational knowledge needs. Some people intuitively understood those needs and some did not, but no one had ever tried to categorize them. In order to accomplish this task, we turned to our ...