Embed knowledge to enhance processes

Capturing the many years` experience inherent in an organisation`s manpower has always been a difficult task. Organisations should develop simple systems to capture this embedded knowledge in a formalised manner, linked to the company`s business processes, says Sybille McCloghrie, director of Tilos Business Solutions.

In SA, many people have not gone through traditional formal education, but they have tons of experience and knowledge. It is difficult for an organisation to feed that information back into the formal knowledge repository of the company.

The mechanism to achieve this is to create a way for people easily to share their knowledge and feed it back into a structured flow. If this process is difficult, such as laboriously having to document how they do things, that knowledge will never be passed down to the rest of the organisation. Within any company, people fulfil tasks differently to how they should, often introducing elements of error, repetition and redundancy. If knowledge management can be formalised in a structured way for the whole organisation, the chances are that people will not repeat mistakes.

There are different ways in which knowledge is passed on in an organisation.

It could be formal documentation, second reference, or by asking "Tannie Francine in accounts". This informal approach to passing on knowledge, often referred to as the "desperation location", could be the solution to providing a person with the information they need.

There should be a process to certify people for embedded knowledge, through recognition of prior learning. Many companies have major knowledge strategies, but they may not recognise people`s experience and accredit for what they know. There has to be some way to quantify that knowledge. It is important to provide a new user with detailed enough information to help them complete a process, or any number of different tasks in a process.

This can be done by tagging measures onto a help program, so if a person struggles to do a particular task, it links them to content that will help them.

For example, in the case of a loan application, a new person needs to understand what to do to complete that process. This information can be fed to them via introductory or refresher courses. The process should have enough information to understand what is required of the person. If they are not doing what is required, the system should be able to identify the problem, then nudge them in a certain direction in terms of a piece of content or an intervention that shows them how to do the process. This intervention can be in the form of an e-learning module or a full course. A system that captures the company processes and the information required by each step in the process is truly empowering. Once it has the power to guide people into a certain intervention if they are struggling, it is not a big step from there to develop a taxonomy or knowledge repository for the company.

Companies should link the taxonomy with what processes are required to get the job done - or the other way around. Then the line between business process management, e-learning and knowledge management becomes blurred, leading to a new convergent space whose attributes will become clear over time.