Category Archives: Knowledge Management

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Business Continuity in the Age of Coronavirus

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Seize this opportunity to enact your knowledge management plan.

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Many businesses are using this time to do online training for their employees. That’s a good idea.

Let me propose a more radical idea – that businesses use this time to create knowledge bases and training materials while your experts may be idled for a time. For all your experts who are usually too busy with the day-to-day work in front of them to capture their knowledge for the next generation of employees, some may be in a slowdown and can be a valuable resource right now.

What is the fallout from an event like the COVID-19 pandemic? What does it mean for companies that are working with skeleton crews or shutting down for a while? What do ongoing essential services look like? Who provides these services? How will business resume? What happens if this virus does, indeed, become the #boomerremover?

This is where a strong knowledge management plan is the bedrock of business continuity planning. With well-documented procedures, businesses can keep operating according to SOP during and after unanticipated events.

Knowledge Management and Business Continuity

The assumption in capturing and preserving critical knowledge in your organization is that:

  • you know where it is
  • you know who knows it, and
  • you have access to those people when you need them.

The premise of a strong knowledge management plan is that you may not always know who those people are, where they are or have access to them when you need what they know to keep your business running, so you should find them, talk to them and plan ahead.

Up until the coronavirus crisis, my supposition has been that the biggest threat – and it is a very big one – to business continuity is the loss of knowledge of your retiring employees. But today, it is clear that the loss of knowledge can occur from a random, “black swan” event such as the one we are experiencing right now. The coronavirus pandemic just underlines the importance of retaining expert knowledge in an era of uncertainty.

Depending on your industry, you may be hit with retail closure, warehouse overload, hospitality industry challenges with closed hotels and grounded flights. All of this will certainly affect planning and operations well into the future.

Like every crisis, this event also holds opportunities for businesses and industries.

“We’re too busy doing the work to document it!”

One of the main complaints I hear from people who are trying to get some time with their subject matter experts to work on knowledge gathering and training is that the experts are so busy doing the work at hand every day, they don’t have time for tasks like working with the training department or cataloging their knowledge. Well, they might be available now. If you want to know where to start, think about the things that would be most damaging to lose, the information that would be difficult to recapture. That knowledge is known only by a few and is least likely to already be captured in a systematic way. In my three books, Working with SMEs, Finding Your SMEs and Retaining Expert Knowledge: What to Keep in an Age of Information Overload, I lay out some ideas for finding critical information and capturing expert knowledge in your organization.

What You Can Do Now to Retain Expert Knowledge

In a work slowdown or stoppage, very busy people (your experts) may have some time on their hands. So, here are just three things to think about – and possibly act on – while the time and corporate will to do so is front and center. These are only three activities, but they can keep your organization busy for a very long time and benefit it even longer.

  1. Let this pandemic threat serve as an example to those who are advocating a knowledge management program within their company to highlight the importance of knowledge capture and ongoing learning programs.
  2. For employees who may have down time or are sitting at home idled by a work stoppage, they can be enlisted to write down their job tasks and processes for future training programs.
  3. Create mentor-mentee relationships between veteran and younger workers with time off so they can get to know each other via Zoom, Skype or a company platform, and give them a structured mentorship program to work through to strengthen company processes and culture in the future.

Software programs, learning modules and methodologies all exist to facilitate these kinds of proactive tactics to bring knowledge management to the forefront of your organization at a time when executives most certainly are worried about their business continuity plans. Even though it seems right now as if business will continue to be slow and the world has come to a halt, operations will resume normally and when they do, these opportunities may be lost as people return to the performance of everyday responsibilities. In fact, there are some classic economic models that suggest a frenzy of “pent up demand” will bring businesses back with a roar, once again pushing knowledge management to the back of the line.

For the people who heeded wise counsel to stop the potential spread of this virus, you will know that all your hard work and sacrifice made a big difference in the outcome. With healthcare workers already contracting the virus on the frontlines, it is clear this must be stopped in its tracks. In the meantime, use this time wisely to do what needs to be done during this hiatus from normal business activity.

If we stay focused on the future, when businesses are all humming along again – and they will be – you will have accomplished something of value by using this downtime to preserve the critical knowledge that makes your company unique in the marketplace.

Want to chat about some things you can do today to use this time to advance knowledge management in your organization? Send me a note at workingwithsmes@gmail.com  and we’ll set up a time to talk. Stay safe out there.

 

PHOTO CREDIT: Image accessed on Bing at https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=coronavirus+affects+business&FORM=HDRSC2.

 

 

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Engineer Wisdom and Miscellany: More Stories from Richard Sakulich

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A few months ago, this blog featured an incident from a delightful little book, Stories from My Working Days by Richard Sakulich, a retired engineer who spent his working life solving problems around the globe for industry. With his eye for irony and ear for the comic, he has recounted his adventures for others to enjoy. His friends, family and the occasional stranger who read Stories from My Working Days have encouraged him to continue, and he has obliged with a sequel, More Stories, just in time for holiday giving. In the new book, his musings continue to explore the comic-tragedy of the human condition through the mind of a logical person.

Work (abridged)

The office atmosphere was fairly relaxed, a professional environment and rather than being one huge room, there were a number of connected smaller areas for the various departments. This helped make it cozier. People worked diligently enough during the day but at the normal quitting time, you did not dare to get caught standing near the exit doors or serious bodily harm could result.

But there were exceptions to the stampede…one of my employees, an Industrial Engineer who had been with the company a fair number of years, was always still at his desk… It bothered me that he worked late constantly, day in and day out, so one night I stopped and stood around a bit until he realized someone was there. We had the following exchange:

Me: Why don’t you pack it in? We certainly don’t expect you to be putting in extra hours like this every day.

Him: It’s no problem. I just want to keep ahead of some of the projects we have going.

The conversation did not end with that, and I dragged out all the stereotyped managerial phrases that are appropriate to a situation like this. Finally, it seemed he was rather tired of my benevolent intentions and he looked up wearily from his desk, shoulders rounded and hunched from a lifetime of paper shuffling…

“Dick! You do not understand. For years, I have had the habit of working late. It is my standard routine, well-established and I am quite comfortable with it. In fact, the people around me have gotten used to it and they scheduled their lives to match. If I went home right now, it would be a complete and utter surprise to my wife. It is the last thing in the world she would expect. In fact, to fill in the time when I work late, she probably plans a little dalliance now and then with some bozo and if I came home early, it is likely I would catch them together.  Now, if that happened, I could not just ignore it. It would be necessary to react and do something and the bottom line is that no matter what that would be, I would have a major marital problem. And Dick, with all the work I have to do here, I don’t have time to deal with a marital problem, too!”

***

Was this beleaguered employee just getting Richard off his back? For this full story, and more stories from the minds of engineers, you can obtain a copy of this privately published gem by contacting me or Richard, and we’ll get a copy to you.

Richard Sakulich’s book is available at local bookstores in the Doylestown, PA area. For most of my readers, that is a bit of a hike…or flight. So, if you would like a copy, contact me at workingwithsmes@gmail.com. I will forward your request to Richard and he will make arrangements to get a copy to you.

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Organizational Challenge for Experts: Trusting and Letting Go

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It’s kind of like being a new parent…

The focus of Working with Subject Matter Experts includes the technical aspects of knowledge capture – the process of what to capture and how to efficiently capture it in a way that makes transfer easy and accessible.

One of the biggest hurdles for people who work with experts to capture and transfer information is the human element. People who capture knowledge from experts find they often must overcome resistance and reticence on the part of the expert.

Here’s why. Experts are used to being in charge. Either they are literally the leader of the organization, or they are one of the smartest people in the organization who house valuable information between their ears. It takes a leap of faith for experts to transfer their knowledge to someone else because it requires two difficult issues for anyone who is used to being on top – trusting other people to do an important job well and letting go so they can do it. After all, the inhouse leader and expert in charge of the domain has often been “getting it done” by himself or herself since the beginning. I have worked with more than one expert who has founded a company or organization, and it is their baby. For any new momma who has ever left her infant with a sitter to run to the grocery, you know about trusting your baby to someone else for the first time. This is kind of like that.

As a writer who has worked with experts and as a momma who has left her babies with someone else for the first time, I offer a few pointers to working with experts to help them trust and let go.

  1. Start small. Don’t expect to get the keys to the kingdom the first few tries. You need to gain the trust of the expert until they know that you understand them and can translate or execute for them in a way that is faithful to their mission and intent. Leave your baby for short periods of time and extend it slowly so your child can eventually go to Kindergarten without you.
  2. Examine resources around the expert to find support for expansion. When a leader is having to trust and let go, it is in the interest of furthering their passion. Maybe they have to let go of some tasks so they can concentrate on more important things. Maybe they want to preserve their work so they can move on. Or maybe they want to preserve it for posterity much later down the line. In any event, knowledge and responsibilities will have to be shifted today, so look for people around them who can be trusted to do the job faithfully in place of the expert. Slowly transfer tasks to trusted others. To extend the mommy metaphor, ask the teenager next door to help you with the baby while you are at home so you can watch them in action before you leave them alone with your child.
  3. Put supports in place to build a replicable framework. Figure out how things are done and capture the processes in steps and schedules. With the right documentation and systems, people will know what to do, how to do it and when to do it to keep things moving without direct input from the expert. Mommies do this when they write down baby’s schedule for the sitter.
  4. Prepare for contingencies. Life happens. Build in backup plans and have extra resources on hand. This might require having a virtual assistant on call to provide administrative support in case the regular staff is overwhelmed, for example. Or you may want to have strong ties to a professional network that can provide experienced engineers (or whatever) to pull through a project. Remember, the hands-on expert has been getting it done all the time and often by themselves. Your goal is to change that dynamic so they can be replicated. Mommies post Grandma’s and doctor’s cell phone for the sitter in case of emergency.
  5. Expect change. As knowledge and control leaves the hands of the expert, the input of other people will have two effects 1) things will be done a bit differently with different people executing tasks 2) the organization will be able to start to grow. Those changes require adaptation from everyone, including the expert.

Be prepared to be an organizational ninja as the expert watches their baby grow up and away from them with supports and systems in place. Help the expert expand his or her knowledge and mission beyond anything he or she can do on their own.

Send those babies out to grow into all they can be.

 

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When A Subject Matter Expert Teaches: Focus is the Key

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It is important to return to the basics occasionally.

The field of expertise and expert knowledge is growing exponentially, just like all knowledge in all disciplines. New ideas are always fun and attractive. No matter how exciting to explore fresh fields, it is important to return to the fundamentals to keep solid ground under your feet.

I was reminded of this yesterday when a colleague approached me with a classic subject matter expert dilemma: We have some brilliant people teaching in our institution, but they are not good instructors. They wander down arcane paths and lose the students.

My colleague is an experienced trainer, in fact an exceptional one with great credentials. We realized this is the time to revisit the basic materials on facilitation and instructional design. So, we put our heads together and came up with a plan for training the program instructor-experts that I would like to share with you:

  1. Hold a required train-the-trainer class that includes all instructors. This serves 2 purposes: it avoids creating an environment that singles out poor performers, and it allows the great performers to provide feedback and mentoring to those who are learning new facilitation and teaching skills.
  2. Ask each instructor to create a 5-slide presentation overview of their class: 1. Title 2. Three learning objectives 3/4/5. description of the three learning objectives. This requires them to focus on their main points in a small amount of space and time, and does not allow for traveling down any rabbit holes.
  3. Keep the train-the-trainer class small so that each person has time to present their slides (6-8 people is ideal)
  4. Develop feedback forms the class uses to rate each person and provide helpful suggestions
  5. Pair each instructor who needs help with a mentor for ongoing support.

Train-the-trainer sessions happen every day. Going back to basics every now and then reminds us to keep our focus on the things that are most important. We can all use a refresher every now and then.

Do you refresh training skills with your experienced trainers?

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

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From the ITMPI Webinar: Intentional vs Accidental Innovative Teams

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Last Thursday, the IT Metrics and Productivity Institute (ITMPI) sponsored a webinar on Retaining Expert Knowledge: What to Keep in an Age of Information Overload about building a crack innovation team by blending Traditional and NextGen experts. We unpacked how to build a winning innovation team, and I wanted to share a bit of it here with you.

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First, let’s define traditional and nextgen experts.

Traditional experts are the employees who have been around awhile. They know your business, your products and processes, your industry and their area of specialty – all extremely well.

NextGen experts are the brilliant new minds that you hire who are wired for success in the age of exploding information. Their expertise forms a foundation for them to bring skills to your team that help you navigate the world of information. NextGen experts know what to look for, where to find it, and how to leverage open source knowledge to build the next great thing.

That blend of traditional and next generation expertise is your secret weapon when you are building an intentional innovative team.

Intentional vs Accidental Innovative Teams

As we look at the definition of intentional teams, we see that there is a lot of thought and choice that goes into determining who will build your next breakthrough product or process. You will ask yourself questions like:

Who has done something like this before?

Who knows where the market is likely to go?

What are our customers thinking?

What are the limitations of the current technology?

What are the unexplored edges of this technology?

Have we tried something similar and failed, and if so, why?

Why isn’t this being done elsewhere right now?

Where are the landmines?

And on, and on…

Your intentional, innovative teams are agile and versatile. They are unlikely to have all the answers you need, but they will know where to find them. They will look up and down your organization for the right people who will know not only the limits and promise of the technology but will know the mindset of the customers and the peculiarities you might face as you develop something new.

Your intentional teams are inclusive. Who is in your organization who needs to be considered? Are there cultural or physical considerations of your employees or your customers? Is your intended product or process accessible for low vision and low hearing individuals and mobility-impaired?  Will someone in another culture understand your frame of reference and intent? Will the socioeconomic status of your employees or intended market limit or expand the possibilities of the features and benefits of your proposed solution? (Hat tip to SEI’s Inclusive Design panel discussion on October 17 in Oaks, PA. Thank you!)

If your innovative teams are not intentional, they are accidental. Accidental teams may make judgments without information. They include people who aren’t interested or who don’t know where to find the answers. Accidental teams are comprised of people who are available at the time to work on the project.

Do you assemble intentional or accidental teams to build your products and develop your processes?

NOTE: You can join ITMPI at no cost to access live webinars. Premium and corporate membership plans are available for recordings and PDU/CDU credit.

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Knowledge Management in a Law Firm: Yes, It’s a Thing

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giammarco-boscaro-380903-unsplash What does knowledge loss cost a law firm? If an attorney leaves a firm, usually knowledge loss is considered in the context of the loss of an individual attorney’s area of expertise and their relationships including the clients that might leave with them. The problem of knowledge management in a firm, however, transcends relationships and even the attorneys themselves.

In an article on legal knowledge management, the focus is on what has historically been called records management with an extended nod to efficiently managing electronic assets such as email. This addresses part of the problem of retaining expert knowledge in a traditional framework.

Forward-looking firms expand their definition of knowledge management to include the value of many types of knowledge – not all of which is legal or relational – and what might be lost to the firm if that information isn’t captured, preserved and able to be transferred as an asset.

Consider:

  • Automation: Begin to consider automating functions once considered human – think legal secretaries. One lawyer who lost the secretary upon whom he relied for support will be doing that job until a replacement is identified at a high cost of losing his billables while doing a job below his pay grade. What parts of that job can be automated or supported virtually to allow a bridge between the different humans who will be sitting in the desk thus retaining important functions beyond individual persons?
  • New tools for capturing, preserving and transferring knowledge: It’s not just what your employees know, it’s how they know it. If you wonder how your wunderkinds think, find out. Give them tools that capture their thought processes so you can replicate how they see the world. Those tools exist, and they allow younger associates to learn how their more experienced counterparts make decisions and craft arguments.
  • Corporate culture: A professional world is often a world of egos and personal value. No, an individual is not irreplaceable, but another valuable individual is different. It’s important to capture the essence of the value of a high-profile, charismatic person to replicate the style as well as the substance of that individual as part of the culture of the firm that you want to preserve to retain your competitive advantage with clients.

As in many other professions and industries, it is difficult to completely inoculate your organization from knowledge loss. Particularly in fields such as the legal profession where personal privacy and data security are acutely critical, capturing and retaining your expert knowledge has unique challenges. Yes, your departing employees will take relationships and tacit knowledge with them. You can’t prevent that. You probably already create barriers to prevent personnel of all types from taking digital assets with them. Beyond that, your employees are storehouses of value some of which may be captured and preserved to retain your edge in an increasingly competitive and cost-sensitive environment.

Is it time you do a thorough knowledge scan of your law firm to find out what you need to preserve and where you need to bolster your assets?

Photo by Giammarco Boscaro on Unsplash

 

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Use Your Subject Matter Experts as Part of Your Data Quality Initiatives

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pankaj-patel-516482-unsplash  An article in the autumn issue of strategy+business  Digital Champions discussed the imperatives of linking all IT systems across the organization to be able to compete, excel and innovate. Certainly, as data is used for decision making, you need to link all pieces of your information architecture together in a way to create an intelligent organization. That means getting data quality right.

First, data quality requires essential tasks like making sure your inputs are accurate. And it goes even further than that. Getting data quality right means that your assessments of your data are also accurate. You’ve got to know what it means and how it is likely to impact you to truly experience the power of the information you are gathering.

For that, you need more than your IT team. Think strategic. Think long-term. And think about involving your experts from across the organization to make sure you are interpreting your information in a way that you truly have an intelligent system.

Here are a few ways to engage your experts in your cross-organization data efforts:

  1. Involve them in determining the parameters for quality inputs.

Your experts understand what defines accurate data in their own field. Involve physicians, chemists, engineers, human resource professionals and so on when you are creating parameters. The values you have been using may be outdated, or the ones set my standards organizations may not apply to your special case, for example.

  1. Ask them to help you rank projects and initiatives by importance

This is where your business teams are especially critical. Your executive team knows best the direction of your organization, so make sure to start there. Then drill down to find out the order in which things should roll out both from a practical perspective (you can’t implement B without making A operational) and which functions are most essential for running the business day-to-day so you don’t trip up your current operations.

  1. Make them part of your documentation teams

After you’ve built it, you need to capture what you’ve done so it can be maintained, built upon and improved over time. Documentation is essential to information management. People need to be able to use it, know where to find it and train others on it. For that, make sure your experts are involved in documenting your systems because they understand the logic behind them and can put the content in context. Sales managers need to be involved in documenting software used by their teams, and so on.

  1. Leverage their experience to help you integrate your initiatives across units, divisions, etc.

No man is an island, and no data capture effort can stand on its own, either. If it is important enough to capture and analyze, it has impact beyond your own part of the organization. Involve people who understand impact upstream, downstream and who know where the bridges are that cross the stream. Cross-check your data gathering efforts with the people who will use it or will be impacted by it in all pockets of the organization and outside the organization – like your customers, suppliers and wholesalers.

  1. Include them in your long-term strategic planning process

We usually think of strategic planning as the province of the executive team and the board of directors. When you dig down into an organization, you have experts in pockets everywhere who may hold vital pieces of information who may contribute to altering your plans or even redirecting them completely. Your experts in different areas will see things in the data and trends that impact your direction.

The quality of your data is only as good as the parameters you set when you determine what to collect, the integrity of the inputs, the way it is organized and interfaced, and the way it is interpreted. Each one of those phases requires experts across the organization who “get it” when it comes to their corner of the world. Find them and ask them.

Photo by Pankaj Patel on Unsplash

 

 

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The Shift: From Training for Information to Training Information Processing

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scott-webb-765610-unsplash  Prepare for a shift in the continuous knowledge management process. As your organization is growing, learning, innovating and bringing on new people, what you know and what you will need to know is constantly changing. The people who know what you need are always changing, too.

Much is being written about the differences in learning styles between Millennials and their younger colleagues about to join them in the workplace. We’re adapting to the fact that learning is more

·      On demand

·      Virtual

·      Mobile or platform-agnostic

·      Flexible

·      Bite-sized

A much bigger shift is on the horizon. NextGen workers really aren’t the same as their predecessors in ways that will cause a tectonic shift in training.

That’s because it is not just the “how we train” that’s changing. The immediacy of all knowledge and the instinctive information-seeking behavior of the youngest working generation also changes the content of our training. Instead of hiring people for what they know, companies will be hiring people for their ability to access what they need to know, how they are able to process it, relate to others and how they apply it. This impacts training in a multitude of ways beyond just making sure our training programs are short, accessible, relevant and just in time.

The next generation of learners – those just entering the workforce fresh out of college this year – have stronger virtual communication skills, online collaboration skills and intellectual independence than any generation before them. They multitask across platforms continually. You don’t need to show them or tell them how to do something. If it is online either inside or outside your organization, they will find it for themselves and figure it out on their own. These skills cross all demographics. This brave new streak changes the role of training from teaching people what to do and how to do it and morphs your training into the role of guiding them in how to apply it to meet your business goals.

Thriving companies will be teaching two main skills that will antedate all else: 1) critical thinking and 2) strategic thinking skills. In fact, a recent Food and Drug Administration guidance for compliance training stated that the #1 skill required today is the ability to think critically.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of the death of training may be a bit premature. However, the reality of the death of “training as we’ve known it” is already a fact. Beyond guiding employees to the information that they need to know, companies will be working with colleagues to develop a culture of cultivating natural intelligence in ways that complement artificial intelligence to make the best possible use of the voluminous amounts of data available to them to make great decisions in real time across the organization.

Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

 

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Build Your Business Muscle with Targeted Knowledge Management

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Chubby wrestler

If you throw a lot of training at a problem, you might be getting some results but they may not be the exact results you need. Too much training with too few results is a sign that your corporate learning might be top-heavy with learning programs built to solve ill-defined problems that don’t focus on clear business solutions.

You can tighten up your flabby programs when you clearly identify your knowledge gaps and define the exact behaviors that will close them. Then make sure those gaps align with your strategic plans.

In fact, LinkedIn Learning’s 2018 Workplace Learning Report found that executives want learning leaders to more closely align training programs with business objectives. Business leaders are overwhelmingly asking for learning to reflect business imperatives and make an impact on the business.

Leadership Craves Impact and ROI_LinkedIn

All of this begs the question: What is the best way to design your corporate knowledge management efforts to align with your business objectives?

The answer to this question is evolving because the technology to create a robust internal corporate knowledge management is improving all the time. While the tech exists now, you still need to have a clear vision of the knowledge you need to capture to get you where you are going.

Just to get started, here are a few overarching ideas to consider as you create your knowledge management plan.

  1. Be clear about where you are today and where you want to be tomorrow. And yes, tomorrow means your 1-year, 3-year, 5-year and beyond strategic plans. These plans get fuzzier the farther out you go because a lot is changing on the ground but it is good to have some general ideas about where you would like to be.
  2. Figure out who your experts are that know how your business runs and thrives today. Some of them will be retiring and some of them will be the bright bulbs you just hired. Identify the things you need to know and the people who know it.
  3. Finally, begin to consider the best ways to capture the knowledge you need to know to secure your current position/customers/contracts/business and what you need to capture or acquire to meet your long-term strategic goals.

Yes, that’s a lot to think about. So over the next few months, we’ll start to dig into each of these areas in more detail. Stay tuned.

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Use 6 Structured Questions to Identify Critical Corporate Knowledge Needs Today and Tomorrow

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One of the core ideas in Retaining Expert Knowledge is to make sure you are spending your valuable, finite corporate training resources capturing the knowledge that is most critical to maintaining and growing your business. That critical knowledge is information to keep your current customers coming back and the information you need for growth and innovation.

Capturing knowledge is more than just a preventative measure against future loss. It also means identifying information to solve current problems and gaps.

Some of that knowledge is in the heads of your employees and needs to be part of your training assets. Identifying the right experts and the right knowledge that you need to capture today requires looking at what is going on in your organization.

On the other hand, some of the information you need to solve current problems or anticipate future needs may not be in your organization today. The sooner you know what you need, the sooner you can begin to go out and find it.

Here are a few suggestions for asking yourself some structured questions to help stem the tide of knowledge loss and for initiating your hunt to bring in information and expertise you need to excel.

  1. Diagnostic Inquiry: Do you have a current and obvious knowledge gap? What are the problems you are experiencing today? What do you need to know to bridge the gap and solve the problem?
  2. Metrics: Which metrics are you trying to impact? Which ones are difficult to move? What do you need to know to be able to take actions to positively move the needle on those hard-to-move metrics?
  3. Performance Analysis: What are employees not doing today that you would like them to be doing? What are employees doing that you would like them to stop doing? Are there tasks that need to be done to which no one is specifically assigned? Are people assigned to tasks that have no real value (busywork)?
  4. Urgency and Frequency: How often does a certain problem occur? How much of your business does it impact? Does it impact your biggest customers and your largest orders?
  5. Location: Where does a problem occur? Does an issue exist in one business unit or at one site? Is the issue across the entire company? Does it happen only under one particular leader or manager?
  6. Scope and Impact: What is the immediate impact of the problem? What is the size of the problem? Is it a shortage? Does it indicate too much of something exists somewhere? Does it impact the whole organization (cultural and broad) or is it isolated to one area, unit, site?

By applying your data-gathering efforts in a structured way, you can be sure you are identifying the information you need to solve problems that are affecting you today and can impact you tomorrow.

Do you conduct a structured knowledge scan in your organization? If so, what methods do you use?

Photo by Jack B on Unsplash