In the course of business, public or private, organizations leverage their assets for success -- information, technical, development, financial capital, their people and what they know. Why would an organization such as yours, not focus deliberately on its "people and their knowledge," one of the most important but fragile assets that you possess and where a large part of the value of your organization and the opportunities for your success resides?

Rapidly-shifting operational and performance goals driven by change in an organization’s operating environment are part of the evolution of any present day public or private sector organization. This change presents you and your organization with multi-dimensional risks to your ability to adapt and to successfully operate “faster than the speed of that change.”

One of the risks organizations in both the public and private sectors face is the constant threat of knowledge loss due to the turnover in their workforce. The ability of your organization to successfully anticipate and to manage the risk of knowledge loss due to workforce turnover often will determine how successfully your organization can address the other multi-dimensional risks facing you.

To mitigate these challenges and risks, organizations need a consistent, disciplined, and sustainable framework for capturing, adapting, transferring, and reusing their relevant and critical knowledge. It is a fundamental part of a successful succession planning and continuity of operations strategy. It’s about creating a high performing and knowledge enabled organization that can effectively deal with and operate “faster than the speed of change,” drive superior and measurable performance, and deliver value to its customers, to its workforce, and to the organization itself.

Ensure that the knowledge within your organization, all of the information and all of the experience in your organization, is searchable, findable, accessible, and reusable across your organization to continuously improve performance at the individual, team, and organizational level.

Success is enabled and measured by the organization’s ability to capture, adapt, transfer, and reuse “what it knows about what it does “ to consistently deliver the highest quality support and services that the customer requires and expects. It is through this ability to leverage key organizational (and personal) knowledge as part of the organization’s strategic thinking and normal business operations that new knowledge not only is created, but also is leveraged to drive innovation in the delivery and creation of the support and services expected. The ability to leverage this accumulated organizational knowledge drives institutional memory, which is retained in the form of experience, judgment, “know-how and know-why” that must be characterized in context for reuse by individuals and the organization in forms that can be used in the absence of those who know.



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