Continuity Management: Preserving Corporate Knowledge and Productivity When Employees Leave

Chapter 12. Operational Knowledge Transfer and Acquisition

The primary goals of continuity management are to preserve and then enhance the critical operational knowledge of departing employees by transferring that knowledge to their successors in such a way that the successors can internalize that knowledge, apply it, and create new knowledge from it as quickly as possible. This phase of continuity management—knowledge acquisition—is focused on the goal of moving new hires quickly up the learning curve, making them as productive as possible as rapidly as possible, and turning them into high-performing employees for whom innovation and knowledge creation are both facilitated and characteristic.

The harvesting of knowledge, the transfer of knowledge, and the acquisition of knowledge are three different, but related, processes. In continuity management:

• Knowledge harvesting is accomplished primarily through the knowledge questionnaire (K-Quest) administered to all participating employees and supplemented by knowledge gathered, compared, and exchanged in the PEAK meetings of peer incumbents and other forums for sharing knowledge among peers.

• Knowledge transfer is accomplished primarily through the knowledge profile, which contains the critical operational knowledge for each job classification and for each job within that classification.

• Knowledge acquisition is accomplished primarily through the design and content of the knowledge profile, the process through which the profile is presented ...