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.

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.

Related reading:


How to get that brain dump from hard-to-replace IT staffers

ITworld.com

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