Knowledge Transfer – An Investment

Posted by Rich Crowley in IT, Knowledge Transfer

Throughout history, man has had to develop and refine ways to pass knowledge on from one human to another and from one generation to another. Two of the most common forms of passing on knowledge are to write things down or to simply pass the knowledge on verbally. Writing things down can take many forms with language and words being the most obvious examples but other forms such as pictures and music have also played a significant role in this regard.

Written things have the advantage of being less susceptible to creative translation by the person who consumes the knowledge. However, written things pose some challenges when knowledge needs to be continually revised since, when it becomes out of date, it loses it’s value dramatically if not updated in its written form. Knowledge verbally transferred may be the most reliable form of getting knowledge from one person to the next but the translation issue alluded to above impairs this technique’s ability to survive effectively over multiple iterations.

For most of my clients, this passing-on of knowledge is a slippery task, made even more difficult in current times by the pace of change in technology. However, this discipline of “packaging knowledge” is becoming increasingly important as a means of helping organizations become more efficient and effective. It is quite amazing to me how much time organizations spend having their people acquire knowledge that already exists within the organization. This can be as simple as training a new person to fill the role of someone who left or having an existing employee, who has a achieved a certain level of knowledge, train a more junior employee so that the former can focus more of their efforts on the complex things befitting their skills and the latter on some of the less complex things that need attention.

What is clear to me also is that while packaging knowledge for future consumption is expensive, it should viewed by organizations as an investment. The alternative, knowledge disappearing as people come and go from the organization, is a simply a recipe for underachieving in the long run.

IT managers are being forced to focus increasingly on knowledge transfer as part of their overall accountability to ensure their shop is well managed. Without solid processes for capturing and transferring knowledge around mainstream IT activities such as requirements definition, architecture, design and application support, it will be difficult to justify to business leaders that they are getting good value for their IT investment dollars.