Knowledge Management Planning and Employment
Bill Hewlett of Hewlett/Packard once said; “If HP knew what HP knew, we could be three times richer.”
As a part of Knowledge Management Planning we try to move Knowledge from residing in the person to being resident in the position or systems and thus staying on the job, even if a person leaves.
The most practised employment Knowledge transfer is conducted as an employee exits and my experience has shown most organisations score an almost complete failure to comprehensively capture the Knowledge available as employees depart. That’s usually high cost to the organisation and potentially high-risk too.
What a people know is what separates any organisation from another. In service organisations it is all they have. Service is Knowledge applied to a task. Why would you not want to manage it strategically?
Packaged coded intellectual property like patents, trademarks, franchises and so on are only 20% of the whole know-how of an organisation. The remaining 80% is valuable too, but it is so intangible it requires careful and specialist outside help to bring it to bear on the market and for the organisation to derive value from it. Few organisations either need or could fully occupy a specialist, so hiring an outsource specialist is normal.
