Working With SMEs

Seize this opportunity to enact your knowledge management plan. Many businesses are using this time to do online training for their employees. Thats a good idea. Let me propose a more radical idea that businesses use this time to create knowledge bases and training materials while your experts may be idled for a time. For all your experts who are u... sually too busy with the day-to-day work in front of them to capture their knowledge for the next generation of employees, some may be in a slowdown and can be a valuable resource right now. What is the fallout from an event like the COVID-19 pandemic? What does it mean for companies that are working with skeleton crews or shutting down for a while? What do ongoing essential services look like? Who provides these services? How will business resume? What happens if this virus does, indeed, become the #boomerremover? This is where a strong knowledge management plan is the bedrock of business continuity planning. With well-documented procedures, businesses can keep operating according to SOP during and after unanticipated events. The assumption in capturing and preserving critical knowledge in your organization is that: you know who knows it, and you have access to those people when you need them. The premise of a strong knowledge management plan is that you may not always know who those people are, where they are or have access to them when you need what they know to keep your business running, so you should find them, talk to them and plan ahead. Up until the coronavirus crisis, my supposition has been that the biggest threat and it is a very big one to business continuity is the loss of knowledge of your retiring employees. But today, it is clear that the loss of knowledge can occur from a random, black swan event such as the one we are experiencing right now. The coronavirus pandemic just underlines the importance of retaining expert knowledge in an era of uncertainty. Depending on your industry, you may be hit with retail closure, warehouse overload, hospitality ...Read More