Observatório de Gestão do Conhecimento

When trying to learn from the experiences of others, reviewing two or three relevant experiences to determine what works for you is no problem, but wading through 100 or even 1000 documented stories? No knowledge seeker will want to suffer through that. So how can organizations respond?

The first question to answer is how knowledge and information is already being documented. Do you have standard operating procedures, templates, or other guiding documents or tools for certain key processes or products? If so, are they generally considered useful and used actively? If so, they likely represent a good starting point for mapping your captured insights from operational experience.

This has two immediate advantages:
1. You are linking your content to a set of resources that is already being used as part of the way people work. Creating a new knowledge repository in its own location and/or platform will fail almost every time because few organizations put in the effort required to actually make it work.
2. No need to reinvent the "categorization wheel": You will be able to organize the knowledge using the same language people already use every day. If documented processes or taxonomy term sets are not available or serviceable, work with operational counterparts to start the effort to categorize your knowledge from the ground up. Creating an initial high level process map of "how things get done" is a good place to start, as well as a first overview of key operational terminologyused in the organization. The key is for the categorization to align with the way people are currently thinking and working.

Once you have an initial process picture or term set that makes sense to operations, map the available captured experiences to them. Not every process step may be covered yet --knowledge gaps that can be targeted and closed-- or there may be knowledge on areas not previously explicitly recognized --an opportunity for process refinement. Regardless, the last step will be to bring it all together and make the first version of your process and taxonomy-based knowledge repository available to your community of users.

What tool to use? Almost anything can be a valid option, as long as you keep in mind, again, that the solution should be aligned as much as possible with the way people are already working and the tools they are already using. After initial release of your “knowledge base” designed for just-in-time knowledge discovery, continue to engage with the community of users, capturing and sharing their operational insights. This will create an ever more complete picture of the available know-how and know-why of your key processes, which can also be used to improve your organization’s templates, SOPs, training, and formal procedures and established practices.

Now your knowledge documentation effort can turn into a virtuous cyclewith your operational communities and their knowledge bases as the beating heart at the center of it all: seeking, providing, adapting, organizing, and re-using the knowledge they need easily accessible in the format that makes sense to them. At that point, the goal of KM becoming self-sustaining and truly embedded as part of the way the organization operates is definitely within reach.