Great post. My approach to strategic change management says the quality of the first five percent determines what happens in the rest of the process. This same principle applies to many situations….

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Cristoph Schmaltz wrote:

Aleksandar, I recently wrote a blog post on knowledge retention. I primarily focused on informal, less structured approaches to it.

If you have time, I would love to hear your comments: http://www.headshift.com/blog/2008/12/should-knowledge-retention-be.php

Best,
Christoph

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Jeff Stenke wrote:

I have been establishing effective KM strategies within my company for many years. We have most of those listed by Arjun. Lately my attention has been focused on the special case of expert knowledge retention and transfer.

I see three primary value drivers:

- minimizing business disruption (due to loss of SMEs)
- acclerating competency (of the newer hires)
- increasing performance (raising a team’s capabilities to that of the SME)
I’ve also found that you may need a new process or two. For example, we’ve introduced knowledge harvesting to capture critical, at-risk expertise when there is little time before the expert leaves. We also have developed a knowledge coaching process that takes technical mentoring to the next level of effectiveness. I think you also have to focus some of the KM processes somewhat differently than for general knowledge transfer. I’ve been sharing and discussing some of these experiences at http://www.retainknowhow.com .

Let me know how these ideas compare to your own.

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John Tropea wrote:

great article…I like this bit “Identifying critical information areas and concentrating on these ensure that a higher quality of knowledge is recorded and retained instead of a “Jack of all trades – Master of none” approach.”

Check out http://www.acidlabs.org/2008/11/04/enterprise-20-identify-problem-determine-solution-then-tools/

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