In this thoughtpiece, from my forthcoming book Knowledge Audits and Knowledge Mapping (Oxford: Chandos, 2016) I trace the origins of knowledge audits in the communication audits of the 1950s. Knowing the history of knowledge audits gives us access to the incredibly rich set of tools and approaches developed by organisational communications scholars and practitioners after the Second World War (and also, incidentally, those developed to support information audits in the 1980s and 1990s). The article also gives a framework for identifying different types of knowledge audits for different purposes. Feedback welcome!

Why do many enterprise taxonomy projects fail? In this thoughtpiece I explain why taxonomy projects are extraordinarily fragile in relation to the quality of the initial evidence gathering stage. I outline a methodology for improving the robustness and effectiveness of an enterprise taxonomy design, through a systematic knowledge audit at the project’s outset.

Download article here

This is the Chinese version of the Taxonomy poster that Patrick shared in 2012.

To download the PDF version of the Chinese poster, click here.

I had enjoyed being part of the process of translating the original poster into Chinese. It felt like visiting an old friend. While I had studied Chinese for about 12 years there was never a need or opportunity to use it in business – until now, 22 years later.

I’d be interested to know if anyone of you finds the translated poster useful.

Here’s our latest infographic poster (formatted for A2 printing) on our knowledge audit process. We also have a video tutorial on the process here. Let us know if you have any questions!

Download the full-size poster here (2MB file).

Back in May 2013, we held a Roundtable on Knowledge Retention Techniques. Carla Newman, Shaharudin Mohd Ishak and Ashad Ahmed very graciously shared with us their journey and experiences in Knowledge Retention.

Carla Newman – ROCK (Retention of Critical Knowledge)

Go to the show page on vimeo by clicking here

Shaharudin Mohd Ishak on IE Singapore’s RACK (Retention of All Critical Knowledge)

Go to the show page on vimeo by clicking here

Arshad Ahmed on Knowledge Retention

Go to the show page on vimeo by clicking here

Nancy Dixon has a terrific post on how NASA went about creating a knowledge continuity strategy to ensure that all the knowledge created in the cancelled Constellation Program can be sustained within the organisation. I’d love to learn more about the knowledge mapping techniques they used, but the centrepiece was a knowledge cafe, used to develop the key focus areas for the strategy moving forward (They have only a year to complete this).

As Nancy points out “Dave Lengyel [head of heads NASA’s Risk and Knowledge Management Program] could certainly have sat at his desk at NASA headquarters and drawn up a knowledge capture strategy, but that plan would not have been able to take into account the unique aspects of each of the Center’s needs. It would not have been as rich nor as comprehensive as the plan the group was able to develop together. Moreover, had Lengyel constructed it on his own, he would then have had the job of selling the plan to those who would implement it – never an easy task with a plan conceived at headquarters! The Knowledge Café gave everyone the opportunity to fully express their thinking and needs and to understand the needs and thinking of their colleagues.”

Bill Proudfit has done a very nice riff on our “wheel of knowledge” (which is based on Dave Snowden’s ASHEN framework). Visit his post for his commentary on how it works in practice!

OK, it’s been a bit of a video tinkering period, partly stimulated by the launch of some new public workshops on knowledge audits, taxonomy development and this month, building a KM strategy. Not to mention a new version of iMovie with some cool effects. So here’s an introduction to some of our most important lessons learned over the years in how to approach a KM strategy exercise with some chance of it moving off the page of the consultant’s report and into some form of reality. Enjoy!

Go to the show page on vimeo by clicking here

Here’s another in our series of video tutorials to different practical knowledge management techniques. It’s taken from a workshop we conducted last week on knowledge audits and knowledge mapping. For ease of use it’s split into three short parts:

PART ONE: DIFFERENT TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE

Go to the show page on vimeo here

PART TWO: DIFFERENT STRATEGIES FOR DIFFERENT KNOWLEDGE TYPES

Go to the show page on vimeo here

PART THREE: CONDUCTING A KNOWLEDGE AUDIT AND BUILDING KNOWLEDGE MAPS

Go to the show page on vimeo here

Knowledge retention and the problems of knowledge loss from an aging workforce have been in the air recently. Matt Moore has a good summary of the discussion on actKM and some other useful links, including the very public spirited exposure of the knowledge retention strategy of Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The astute Matt concludes that the panicky “Oh my God, they’re leaving next week, let’s interview everyone” approach is probably ineffective, but an opportunity to start something more sustainable and long term. Hence the value of the TVA link.

Kim Sbarcea blogged in the same week on quite a different form of knowledge retention problem, the loss of records from NASA’s moon landing – tapes of the original video recording of the first moonwalk, which apparently were never broadcast in their full quality, and have now disappeared in a poor recordkeeping chain of control. NASA, it seems, is a good punching bag for knowledge retention advocates: a high profile public agency that has been around for long enough to lose both tacit and explicit knowledge assets in noticeable numbers. David DeLong’s must-read book on this topic Lost Knowledge starts with NASA’s inability to recreate the technology that originally got them to the moon, because they’d lost the expertise of the people who originally built it.

Knowledge loss interests me particularly because it’s one source of organisational ignorance. But I’m beginning to think that “knowledge retention” is not the best descriptor to use – because it’s essentially backward looking and conservative, and assumes that keeping all your knowledge is necessarily a good thing. I recall from a previous discussion on this topic on actKM, Matt Moore cheekily remarked (paraphrasing from memory), “sometimes you want that experience to walk out the door, it frees you up to innovate”.

So “knowledge assurance” seems to me a better phrase to use, because it’s forward looking, looks at anticipated knowledge needs, is open to new knowledge needs, identifies both risks and opportunities, directs us to think about how critical knowledge gets regenerated in new people as well as slowing down the departure of knowledge-holding employees or simplistically focusing us on “documenting” what they know before they go.

This broader perspective makes it much clearer that we need to put in place a portfolio of strategies to strengthen the internal web of knowledge – eg through both targeted and diffuse knowledge transfer interventions, sharing processes and platforms, communities, mentoring and coaching, talent attraction and recruitment, training, storytelling, apprenticeships and experimentation, succession planning, planned experience building, embedding expertise into process and yes (sorry Dave) even writing recipes. Some of it is about ensuring the flow of knowledge is sufficiently active to maintain a healthy “knowledge reservoir” within the social group; some about creating more easily transferred knowledge assets.

Even in the “harder” domain of records management, the overwhelming bulge of digital information that organisations now create must compel a triage of sorts: and this triage must be as much about prioritising based on our (and our successors’ ) anticipated future need for a document, as about whether it illuminates an important event. As Shawn Callahan says (in my personal blog quote of the week) “time is a continuum not a category”. Looking after our knowledge is not just about keeping the stuff we have or the stuff from the past. It’s also about seeing ourselves as responsible for our future.