How much do you know about your own in-house knowledge base? How do you stop that knowledge draining away when people leave? What about the areas in which you have expertise that you didn’t know existed in the first place?
Twitter University founder Marko Gargenta tells IT Pro exposing those “unknown knowns” – as late US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld might have said – can be critical. “There’s tacit knowledge and there are documented nuggets of wisdom, like policies, procedures, things that are stable,” says Gargenta, currently chief executive of provider PlusPlus.
Within tech companies, especially those which continually innovate and reinvent themselves, a lot of knowledge falls into the less explicit category, Gargenta points out. Often firms rely on the ad hoc tap on the shoulder in situ to transfer tacit information, but this isn’t efficient.
Instead, teams should discover tacit knowledge – for example by interviewing both up and down the hierarchy, asking lots of questions, then triangulating to expose knowledge gaps. They should also find challenges and develop multiple perspectives. Once made explicit, that knowledge can be documented and taught.
Read comments from our CTO Jaco Vermeulen in the full article in IT Pro.
