ITworld.com - Leverage web technologies to capture and manage knowledge assets

The problem is an old one, and there is no sign of a magic solution coming along, despite all of our wonderful technology. If anything, modern digital tools and techniques exacerbate the problem. Personal computers - for all their power - have a nasty habit of becoming information 'silos'. Change is so rapid on the applications side of IT that it is positively commonplace for single "power users" to emerge as the sole possessors of key information about mission critical applications and - by implication - business processes.

I have been on both sides of this problem recently. There have been times when only I knew how to do something and I needed to communicate it effectively before moving on to new challenges. There have also been times where I was tasked with working closely with a domain expert to capture some of their knowledge in digital form before they moved on to a different department. In both scenarios, I found parts of the current web technologies landscape very useful.

The first issue is how to capture knowledge. If you are the one with the knowledge and you open up a word processor to start typing, "writer's block" is a common problem. Expertise is not linear and not static. It is positively tough to translate it into a linear, hierarchically decomposed set of words and pictures.

I hit that writer's block syndrome recently and used Youtube as an inspiration. I grabbed a colleague, a digital camera and a high definition video recorder. I asked my colleague to interview me near a whiteboard. She asked me questions about the subject matter, I responded and drew pictures. A couple of hours later I had a great starting point for my writing, along with snapshots to use as a basis for my diagrams. The final result of this knowledge project was a section of the intranet containing the written documentation, the photo library and the video of the interview sessions.

I have used the same technique with a twist when on the other side of the fence. I recently worked with a colleague who had key knowledge about a mission critical system he wanted to capture before taking his promotion. I could see the look of trepidation on his face as he faced writing it down. I grabbed the digital camera, video camera and we parked near a whiteboard. Some hours later we had some great stuff captured. We set up a mini-website using a WIKI package and together we turned the material into a knowledge base. We worked as a pair. I would write up a topic and invariably get stuff wrong (I'm not the expert here!). My colleague, the expert, would then step in and fix my stuff. It worked great. Afterwards, he commented on how much easier it was for him to identify and fix the gaps in my exposition rather than for him to create the exposition from scratch. In my experience, this is a common pattern.

An amazing amount of good knowledge capture work can be done using some of today's "standard" and cost-effective web technologies such as WIKIs, digital photos, digital video/audio. Going one step further, some of today's web technologies are great for minimizing the knowledge problem by avoiding it in the first place. Take a handful of today's so-called "social software" applications, and deploy them locally on your intranet. Blogs for day-to-day capture of what is going on and what is being worked on. WIKIs for collaborative knowledge bases. Flickr-style photo site for capturing whiteboards. A Youtube-style repository, capturing the whiteboard exposition sessions for posterity. A del.icio.us-style tagging system for knowledge classification. And so on. There is a lot of power here that can be tapped.

Personally, I think the video capture approach has tremendous untapped potential. I recently went to see the film "I am Legend" and was greatly taken by the head mounted video camera the scientist used in the lab to capture his work as he went about doing it. This method has a bright future I suspect and I look forward to experimenting with it myself soon.