Knowledge capture is the process of gathering, collecting, and codifying an organization’s knowledge and know-how so that it can be stored, shared, reused, and leveraged. With the increasing importance of intellectual assets relative to physical and financial assets, most organizations have begun to actively focus on managing their knowledge capital.
There are many approaches for effective knowledge capture. The right approach depends on many factors, such as organizational culture, available resources, and types of know-how. It is very important to be clear about the goals of knowledge capture. If organizations don’t take a focused and practical approach to capturing knowledge, it could end up trying to capture every available document from its staff.
Knowledge representation is the step of taking a collection of disparate documents and transforming the intellectual content into the optimal formats for storing and sharing. Some of the more common formats include process flow maps, timelines, recipes, and IF-THEN rules. Data visualizations and a variety of rich media formats are also useful in certain settings and for certain types of knowledge. Knowledge that is represented in these formats is much easier to understand and absorb.
Iknow works with clients to evaluate which formats and approaches will work best for their individual environments. Then we recommend the most effective and cost-efficient ways for knowledge capture. These might include self-service approaches, supported by appropriate training and tools, or the use of specialist staff members who can help collect, edit, and upload knowledge assets. New technologies for automated knowledge capture, tagging, and workflow can help minimize the support resources required for effective knowledge capture.
Iknow provides recommendations on the optimal approaches for capturing different kinds of knowledge and on the best way to represent the knowledge for long-term preservation. We can also recommend technology solutions to facilitate knowledge capture and ensure that it’s accomplished as efficiently and cost effectively as possible.
Iknow can organize, facilitate, and lead knowledge capture and representation initiatives and deliver well-designed and complete knowledge bases.
Knowledge capture and representation processes are often the highest value-added activities in a broad knowledge management program because core business process maps, critical business rules and decision logic, lessons learned, and other types of operational expertise held by a small number of internal experts tend to be the organization’s key knowledge assets.