Skip to main content

Typical issues I help organisations tackle

From Knowledge-at-work: Capturing corporate memory here's a typical list of issues organisations are faced with (tell me your company is any different):
  • personal contacts, passage talk, and informal communication no longer work.
  • Our tacit knowledge is not openly visible,
  • we are re-inventing key stuff,
  • vital lessons learned are falling through the cracks and
  • new insights are not being effectively integrated.
  • We find new employees starting from scratch with little access to corporate lore,
  • no way to ask the right questions or find the people who may 'know'.
  • we have key insights locked in e-mail threads, useful ppt presentations and Word docs hidden on multiple hard drives,
  • process dos and don'ts that are not updated,
  • useful heuristics that walk with staff turnover,
  • business intelligence that is gathered but not sifted, collated or dispersed,
  • vendor and customer feedback that gets lost or never relayed.

The "how I work with this" has a lot to do with culture of the organisation - some are very keen on tighter documentation and procedures (scientists and engineers tend to drift this way), others are into more social contact to share the knowledge (think marketing, planning and the like) whilst other are all about putting it into one big central bucket (enormous simplification) and letting others find it (libraries, records, "do-ers").

There is no one answer and definitely no one silver bullet - this is all about people (computer are just another tool like a filing cabinet or a tea room) and, as we all know, people are bloody contrary beasts :-)

Does that explain what I do?

Comments