Continuity Management: Preserving Corporate Knowledge and Productivity When Employees Leave

Chapter 11. Creating the Knowledge Profile

Knowledge Profiles carry the knowledge DNA of an organization. As transporters of the genetic code of corporate knowledge, knowledge profiles transfer to successive employee generations the critical operational knowledge through which an organization builds its productivity, its quality, and its capacity for innovation. The cycle of knowledge preservation and creation that the profile enables makes it possible for each employee generation to profit from the lessons of preceding generations and so produce a powerful knowledge legacy and a true learning organization. This virtuous cycle enhances employee competencies and delivers the prized competitive advantages that characterize a continuity-managed organization.

K-Quest is the instrument through which critical operational knowledge is harvested from incumbent employees, but the knowledge profile is the means through which successors acquire it. The focus of K-Quest is on knowledge capture and the incumbent employee. The focus of the knowledge profile is on knowledge acquisition and the successor employee. The two instruments reflect two different goals, and two different perspectives even though they deal with precisely the same knowledge.

Once technology has converted the completed K-Quests into knowledge profiles, a three-part process is employed to validate the operational knowledge and ensure its currency:

1. Meetings of peer incumbents to discuss and validate the operational knowledge harvested ...