LTGR Ep. #11 - Where Does all the Knowledge Go?
In this episode, Susan and Dan tackle the question: What happens when key team members leave and take their knowledge? The show kicks off a conversation on how organizations capture internal knowledge, and on what kinds of things motivate people within your organization to share and document their know-how.
Show Notes:
What happens when key team members leave and take their knowledge? The legacy of information.
This is becoming a huge issue. Content expertise, know-how of how to get things done, past success and failure, tacit and explicit.
Nick Bontis at McMaster University is studying intellectual capital. Much of a company’s value is knowledge that is not documented.
Susan asks what happens when it is not politically safe to write some of the information down!
Exit interviews are one way of capturing some of that information. Companies are building intranets with Q&As, wikis, and other tools. But people won’t share if there is no incentive. Again, Susan points out risk. Dan explains a point system to compensate employees for sharing information.
Intel’s wiki provided an opportunity for employees to share the company’s history.
Susan says with higher education, focus would be important to address specific problems.
Dan shares horrible story as example of where knowledge sharing would have saved time and money.
http://www.schoolforge.net/ — K12 educators looking at open source applications for schools.
http://www.KM4dev.org — International groups like UNESCO and World Bank discuss implications of intellectual capital. (Nick Bontis says only 20% of intellectual capital is used.)
Susan tells about recent experience with consultant and podcasting to keep her work growing.
Listeners, what to do with your intellectual capital? How are your organizations capturing any type of information? How would people become motivated within your organization to share solutions to problems? What kinds of financial incentives would work? Tell us!
January 3rd, 2007 at 12:58 pm
Hi Susan and Dan,
Thanks so much for starting to podcast again. You two are so great to listen to. You inspired my 21st Century Learning Webcast .
At my job as the Director of Technology at an Independent School in New York City I’ve been struggling with knowledge management as things change so quickly. We’re thinking of using screencasts and blog tutorials as our documentation — possibly in drupal book format — or wordpress linked pages. We’ll see how that ends up. In my department, we’ve been using a wiki to document and work on shared documents. So many different technologies, and no clear winner.
In terms of motivation, I think that our leaders need to set examples and these types of documentation work need to be part of our job descriptions. Just as students have to have clear expectations for their work, so do teachers. I know that our curriculum mapping project was huge benefit for incoming faculty, but it has waned because there was no continued administrative support.
Thanks again for your show… The other post from Jan 1 seems to be the wrong mp3. I’m looking forward to it.
Happy New Year!
- Alex Ragone
January 8th, 2007 at 12:15 am
Hi Alex:
Great to hear from you and that we inspired webcast about wikis. You sure came up with a fantastic list of resources in the chat transcript.
There’s an active discussion about knowledge sharing approaches based on this podcast that is going on in the LearningTimes community. http://home.learningtimes.net/learningtimes?go=1456308
Making knowledge sharing part of the job description is a necessary step I think to keeping the momentum going - incentives to share what we know is at the heart of the issue.
I wonder whether K12 environments are ready to tackle this on a formal basis?
Dan
January 10th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
Hi Dan,
Thanks for the post — I’m going to check out the inside community conversation.
I do think that you’re starting to see some of this in K-12 environments. Curricumum Mapping is an example. There is lots more to be done, but the process is beginning.
- Alex
January 12th, 2007 at 3:19 am
Where does all the knowledge go?
Thank you to Susan and Dan about LT Green Room because They have give a great knowledge that I will teach other people in my community.
That is where all this knowledge will go to and I will to have more knowledge from Susan and Dan.
Thank you.
Kindly Regard
Samuel Mabaso
March 14th, 2007 at 10:33 am
Good site! I found in google.com +