Continuity Management: Preserving Corporate Knowledge and Productivity When Employees Leave

Part II. Confessions of a Continuity Manager

In Part I, you came to understand the acute and chronic threats of knowledge loss to organizational productivity. You examined the unique importance of knowledge and its emergence as a capital asset in the new economy. You discovered that operational knowledge is a commodity that can be passed from one employee generation to another and also a process by which existing knowledge is acquired and new knowledge is created. Perhaps you've even become intrigued by the competitive advantages of continuity management. All of which leads you to.... what?

To a knowledge hole. To the question of how to go forward, to implement, to make continuity management happen. After all the whys and whats, it's time for the how-to's.

Continuity management is made powerful by its application. Like any business model, framework, or paradigm, it is useful only if it can be implemented to achieve specific organizational objectives.

Whereas Part I is primarily about concepts, Parts II and III are about action. They describe how continuity management can be implemented in any organization by managers who recognize its potential and take advantage of it. Subsequent chapters thus focus on implementation—on the journey to continuity management—and on the road map for getting there. Part II depicts that road map through a literary device. Rather than the essays of preceding chapters, the next seven chapters employ entries from a journal—Brett's journal—as a narrative lens ...