Leverage web technologies to capture and manage knowledge assets

A key asset of most organizations is knowledge. A key issue for many organizations
is capturing and managing that knowledge.

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.

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