I’ll solve the first one right now. You don’t even know you have a problem.
So here’s the second problem. Ever wonder what happens to all that data that comes into your business? Unless you are 100% confident you have effective systems and standard operating processes in place to handle it ALL for you, your business is sitting on a ticking data bomb. Businesses that don’t wake up to this reality are doomed to fail. Most people set aside the deluge of incoming data, hoping somebody or something else is going to handle it for them, because they either don’t know how to handle it or they don’t have time to handle it. But what if it’s just sitting there, festering… or what if it slips into a black hole? In any case, if your business isn’t actively working to defuse that data bomb, it will explode and crush your business without any warning.
Meet the unhappy employee who is feeling stuck at his corporate job. He can’t seem to find clear resources to move his career forward. He checks the HR (human resources) portal, then he checks his department’s portal, and the company newsletter archives. They all seem to offer something contradictory. How does he know what to trust? One of these resources did seem to have a semblance of a mentoring program, but it’s showing that none of the mentors are available. Some of these people are no longer in the company either. How old is this system? And is anyone still maintaining it? At best, any contact with a live person comes back with a half-washed answer.
His boss is working him half to death, having to address urgent customer issues every single day, to keep the fires from spreading further. This is not the job nor the career he originally signed up for 5 years ago. He was supposed to be a backline project developer, not an impromptu supervisor for customer-facing technical support. He wants to enroll in various development and technology programs in hopes to grow his career, but his manager says the department doesn’t have the budget for such training. And he’s barely able to find any time for the free online programs at his company without interfering with his work or cutting into his family life. He can’t find any decent openings internally in his company for a technology job that appeals to him; they either require him to already have years of experience or a degree in whatever he yearned to get trained in, or he would have to take a substantial pay cut for a job that doesn’t make full use of his talents.
After weighing the options, the employee puts in his 2 week notice. He concluded that being burned out at work with barely any recovery time over the weekends is not worth his health and sanity. As this was an important position in the department, HR has to find a replacement immediately. Since they were unable to fill the position after two weeks, they have to open it up to the public. The company does eventually fill the position after 2 more months, but they have expended resources for recruitment and training in excess of that former employee’s normal annual salary. Fail. And worse, that replacement employee quits after 6 months. Double fail. Why do businesses keep repeating the same old fails? I believe failed knowledge management practices within multiple echelons of the corporation lead to this unhappy employee resigning from his position. He knew what kind of job he wanted to migrate into. Unfortunately, he could not find any clear and reliable path to facilitate this in his former company.
And this is only one example of how lack of, or failed, knowledge management practice is hurting businesses.
Knowledge management is not just about informational data. Knowledge is a special kind of information that allows its users an actionable way to solve problems quickly and effectively. Knowledge management is about making sure the knowledge is reliable and of good quality. It’s ensuring that knowledge is maintained so that people are not confused over contradictions, omissions, or duplication. And perhaps most importantly, it’s easy to understand and it’s immediately available to the people who need it, at any moment, to help them resolve a specific problem.
Information has life cycles but it doesn’t decay like you typically find in physical life cycles. Maintaining a knowledge base, or any kind of data base, is like maintaining a garden. If nobody is pruning back overgrowth or pulling weeds out of the garden, eventually weeds will overtake the entire garden, crowding out any useful fruits of knowledge buried within, assuming if any are to be found. Likewise, if there is no work invested in cleaning up the accumulated data and purging obsolete information to maintain order, it will default to entropy, the tendency towards chaos. And the larger the stinking data dump grows, the faster entropy ensues. See where this is leading to?
What if one day you need that knowledge to solve an urgent problem, and you can’t reach the corresponding subject matter expert? If you’re lucky enough to find that hidden fruit of knowledge, then there’s also the question of whether you can trust it at all to solve this burning issue. But odds are, you’re not going to find what you need when you need it. This is how the example company lost a dedicated employee; he reached his breaking point before he was ever able to find a satisfactory solution to help him further develop his career.
I believe most businesses already have all the knowledge they need to succeed, but it’s not being capitalized effectively. There’s potentially a lot of quality knowledge hidden in digital data dumps or even in biological brains that’s sitting there locked up and unavailable. Some companies have already recognized the need for this: “If only HP knew what HP knows.”
The good news, you don’t need to be a knowledge management expert to get started practicing. If you live in the DFW area, no doubt you have the October 2019 tornado fresh in your memory. So wherever you live, take some time to revise your family emergency and disaster recovery plan, or start one if you don’t already have one. And make it readily accessible in case you ever need it.
Welcome to my blog about grassroots-style knowledge management and digital de-cluttering. It is my mission to help your business liberate and leverage your own knowledge resources so you can be more profitable and more efficient without sacrificing human capital.