Bill Hobler wrote:
> I am also of a mind that there is so much captured in the minds of
> perceptive people that no one can have a full blown concept of a
> whole organization. Therefore, my dilemma is how to find the
> people to bring together, and how to trigger the right memories to
> cause the needed insights from each of them to arrive at the best
> solution to a complex business problem? For the trivial problem I
> can use a computer. For the important problems I need people.
A year ago we tried to use computer technology to store the "knowledge"
acquired by the people in our department. The idea was once a problem was
solved, the solution should be documented, as well as the context for the
problem. This would allow us to "store" our experience, and refer to it as
we progressed.
The projected lasted about four months, and was then disregarded. There
were a couple of problems: It was impossible to document all the decisions
made in the normal course of a day, much less provide contextual
background information; it was difficult to determine which of all the
problems we solved should be documented; and, once documented, it was a
pestiferous chore to find the solution to a problem.
We are still wrestling with some important issues, which our project
attempted to solve:
1) How should information about complex business issues be stored,
shared, and accessed for future reference? Should we just go on the
minutes from our meetings? Is it worth our time and money to
document, with a contextually rich annotation, the solution to major
business decisions?
2) Is it possible to document the "wisdom" that was foundational to
the solution of a problem? Is wisdom something too human to
document?
3) How can we keep the knowledge and wisdom we develop as a
department (and small teams) even though attrition claims the people
that contributed to that knowledge?
4) How do you represent, in a database, the relationships that exist
between decisions? A single decision could, theoretically, lead to a
thousand more decisions. Each of those decision could lead to another
thousand. It is difficult to document the inferences, implications, and
ramifications of a decision . . . and to link all of those into something
that is both coherent and relevant.
We've talked about using the Intranet to do this (and in fact use the
Intranet to document our Quality Handbook and all of our ISO
procedures, etc.) but that is a far cry from documenting the wisdom
and experience that existed or that emerged from important business
decisions.
I'm not sure how to solve this problem. As a team we've discussed it,
and worked on many possible solutions, but have yet to find an
effective way of storing the pertinent information.
I've followed this thread with great interest, as this is a critical issue
for my department.
--Benjamin B. Compton ("Ben") | email: bcompton@novell.com Novell GroupWare Technical Engineer | fax: (801) 222-6991
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>