The Complete Guide to Knowledge Management: A Strategic Plan to Leverage Your Company's Intellectual Capital

Chapter 7. Capturing and Reusing Existing Knowledge

In this chapter you will:

Understand that capturing existing knowledge by codifying and disseminating it is a must for knowledge organizations, especially for promoting new use (which prevents unnecessary innovation).

Gain tools for efficient capturing processes and for incorporating them into the ongoing activities of an organization.

Learn how to make the captured knowledge available to all potential knowledge workers, from introducing newcomers to the essential skills to updating the veterans.

Motivation and Obstacles

Capturing existing knowledge, by codifying and disseminating it, is a must for any knowledge organization. It is essential to document the organization's knowledge so that employees can continuously reuse it, as well as find ways for its new-use. New use is a term used to describe strategizing new ways of utilizing an organization's knowledge in new and innovative ways.

Often, when introduced to knowledge management (KM) methods, the first bright idea that managers have is to install some kind of fancy software in order to document all the existing knowledge at their disposal and then try to disseminate it. We will later see that this is usually easily said than done.

In addition to documentation, though, there are many other possible methods intended to facilitate the reuse and new use of knowledge. These include practices such as mentoring programs and apprenticeships, workshops, lectures, and continuing education courses ...