I used to be an accountant, we know all about financial/monetary assets and keeping track of them, but what about knowledge? A lot of which walks out the door at the end of the day in the heads of your staff.
A lot of organizations don’t think of knowledge as an asset, so don’t manage it appropriately. Here are some things to consider to help you figure out if knowledge is an asset at your organization. (Thanks to Nick Milton for the list and the idea.)
- If your organization requires good knowledge based decisions, then knowledge is one of your key assets.
- If you are a consulting firm, a contractor, or an educational or professional body that creates and deploys knowledge on behalf of customers and clients, then again knowledge is one of your key assets.
- Knowledge will also be a key business issue for you if your staff turnover is high, and you need to transfer knowledge to new employees.
- Knowledge is a key business issue for you, if much of your core operational knowledge is held by people approaching retirement age.
- Knowledge is a key business issue for you, if you are involved in repeat activity, where knowledge from the past can help improve future performance.
- Knowledge is a key business issue for you, if many dispersed parts of the business are performing the same process, with varying results (in other words, some parts of the business know how to perform operations better than other parts, and that knowledge needs to be shared and re-used).
- Knowledge is a key business issue for you if your budget is being challenged and you have to contemplate delivering ‘more for less’, or (in the words of the business cliché) “work smarter, not harder”. Working smarter means making better use of your organisational knowledge.
So, is knowledge an asset at your organization? What are you doing to take care of it?
Hi Stephanie,
Well if “Knowledge will also be a key business issue for you if your staff turnover is high, and you need to transfer knowledge to new employees.” you are in troube aren’t you ? May be more urgent to investigate in HR first.
Another example I have seen is the case of companies operating in medium size units in many different places. It is no so much that a place perform better but you have to open new ones on a continuous basis and to bring in Knowledge as well as other assets (machines for example). Since it is usually across cultural barriers it involves also preparing well the Knowledge Transfer so an extra care of the Knwoledge asset. It’s obvious for companies which passed this stage, less for those who plan to expand.
Thanks Bruno,
Some areas just have higher than average turnover, call centres and help desks, for example. They are entry-level, low paying, repetitive, challenging jobs and people don’t stay in them for long, in a lot of cases, so it’s important to have good on-boarding and knowledge capture processes to address that situation.
Hi Stéphanie,
Good example and getting call centers operators to be up to the task is a real challenge. IMO it is a typical case of Just in case knowledge at it’s extreme. I studied this field some years ago.
The knowledge on the product and services don’t reside with the employer, the call center but with the customer. It is build upon time from the various interactions. It is supplied to the call center as a set of scenarios, keywords and it will appear on a screen as the conversation unfold. There is no need for the operator to internalize the instructions, to make sense out of it or learn it before. There are even some standardized ways to transmit these procedures so that you can move from one call center to another.
I am wondering if we call this a knowledge or just orders and instructions.
From the business customer point of view producing the scenarios is a real challenge but they are not concerned by the turn over.
This is a special case of the need of expliciting knowledge when you subcontract work. Let say if you subcontract software development you will need to transfer requirements but also some understanding of the field, and some know-how on how to use other existing bricks of the application or techniques if it is advanced technology (and the knwoledge is not yet commonly available). Yet another application of KM.