Organizations and federal governments are grappling with loss of talent and institutional knowledge due to workforce retirement and aging which are inevitable changes.
In mature organizations, more and more experiential and tacit forms of knowledge are held by the very resources that are transient; thus making the capture and retention of that knowledge - critical to the continued success of the firm - difficult if not impossible. Holding this knowledge in traditional forms of content repository was possible if user unfriendly till now, but with the exponential rise in information and siloed ideas, it is increasingly difficult, out-of-place and impossible to keep up.
Add to this the emerging workforce – the Millenials, growing in a wired world and conversant with cutting edge collaborative technologies; find it increasingly frustrating to deal with well intentioned but archaic ways and means of knowledge exchange and transfer.
One of the ways to address this is to refashion the way we look and offer solutions for enterprise knowledge management and learning. As such I propose an Enterprise Distributed Authoring (EDA) as an aid to established knowledge management efforts in firms to enhance authoring, repository, management, retention and ultimately exchange of knowledge in the enterprise.
The success of Wikipedia and its success in evolving from an unreliable source to an academia accepted reference storehouse is a case in point. This readable and writable platform provides the ability to create, change and move documents on a remote server by/to distributed authors and its users.
Practically, technological barriers to the creation of such a platform are very low, but change management issues have to be addressed. Clear and tangible goals as success metrics at the start have to be set. Business-focused metrics, implementation metrics - whether the information is used in practice, how current the information is - and also cultural metrics should be analyzed. The change from static categorization to dynamic categorization is also a significant plus point that can be further explored.
In mature organizations, more and more experiential and tacit forms of knowledge are held by the very resources that are transient; thus making the capture and retention of that knowledge - critical to the continued success of the firm - difficult if not impossible. Holding this knowledge in traditional forms of content repository was possible if user unfriendly till now, but with the exponential rise in information and siloed ideas, it is increasingly difficult, out-of-place and impossible to keep up.
Add to this the emerging workforce – the Millenials, growing in a wired world and conversant with cutting edge collaborative technologies; find it increasingly frustrating to deal with well intentioned but archaic ways and means of knowledge exchange and transfer.
One of the ways to address this is to refashion the way we look and offer solutions for enterprise knowledge management and learning. As such I propose an Enterprise Distributed Authoring (EDA) as an aid to established knowledge management efforts in firms to enhance authoring, repository, management, retention and ultimately exchange of knowledge in the enterprise.
The success of Wikipedia and its success in evolving from an unreliable source to an academia accepted reference storehouse is a case in point. This readable and writable platform provides the ability to create, change and move documents on a remote server by/to distributed authors and its users.
Practically, technological barriers to the creation of such a platform are very low, but change management issues have to be addressed. Clear and tangible goals as success metrics at the start have to be set. Business-focused metrics, implementation metrics - whether the information is used in practice, how current the information is - and also cultural metrics should be analyzed. The change from static categorization to dynamic categorization is also a significant plus point that can be further explored.
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