Why You Should Be Institutionalizing Your Knowledge

Why You Should Be Institutionalizing Your Knowledge

What happens when your most experienced and knowledgeable employees are walking out the door for job transfers, promotions, or retirement?

If their veteran knowledge hasn't been properly crystallized in your systems, your company may find itself learning the same lessons over and over. Nobody wants that, right? (Except maybe your competition).

Institutional knowledge (or institutional memory) can be summed up as the combination of stored experience, technical expertise and domain know-how of a company - the digital footprint, if you will. During very long remediation project lifecycles, this is especially true.

It's not a stretch to say that organizations put a lot of time and money into developing their knowledge and capability set. Although some of that ends up manifesting into policies and documentation, the majority of lessons learned usually end up residing in the minds of employees.

While the ultimate form of knowledge preservation would be digitizing and uploading the content of our brains to the cloud ...we're not quite there yet. So - what CAN you do to ensure that your employees don't leave with valuable wisdom?

For starters, evaluate your digital assets.

Today, collaborative, centralized software platforms, like ENFOS, allow teams to interface with vendors, consultants and colleagues in real-time.  The single, shared record of data means that everyone is working with a single version of the truth - minimizing conflicting documents, avoiding the headache of version control and helping to enforce data requirements.

This evolving record of useful information means that new hires can easily engage with the relevant historical data that can onboard them more effectively. Put simply, institutionalizing your knowledge can mean a serious upgrade for your training programs and transitional risk management.

Most crucially, patterns (that were always there) become more visible when you're dealing with a shared platform of data. Bringing disparate information sets together can reveal insights that may profoundly affect decision-making. Fleshing out the living history of your projects can certainly alter their future. Plus, in the case of mergers or C-level shake-ups, having a robust institutional knowledge set allows new initiatives to properly build off of old ones.

As we face a massive wave of forthcoming retirees, we must be proactive and ensure that their wisdom doesn't leave with them. 

Curious as to what a remediation-specific software platform can offer your business?
Book 15 minutes with us  - we've got time to find out with you.

 

 

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Posted in Industry News