Customer
A defense agency working in technical analysis, research
and development.
Situation In most organizations, experiential
knowledge leaves when people do. When a group’s knowledge
resides “one man deep”, or with single key individuals,
the risk of it going for good means that wheels will be
reinvented, and mistakes that may have been avoided are
bound to be repeated, and costs will increase. A Jet Engine
Testing facility was about to lose a whole generation of
critical experiential knowledge.
Customer Problem "We were originally looking
for a knowledge capture tool to reduce the risks caused
by the loss of key staff. These experts are in limited supply”,
therefore succession planning was the other major issue
to address. The company was losing more than 90 man years
of high level experiential knowledge in extremely specialized
fields: “The organizational impact of their loss would
have been huge, it would have lead to large scale re-invention
of the wheel in many areas. This would have severely impacted
our ability to innovate due to the time penalty incurred
by this re-learning process."
“Without the ability to capture [one member’s]
complete understanding of how this area should function,
we would now be unable to execute many of their divisional
projects, some of which had been running for 2 years or
more.”
Solution After considering alternatives
Knowledge Genes® was chosen because nothing
else met our specification. The ‘Why’ question
was unlike other tools; it asked for validation to clarify
relationships. We were impressed by Knowledge Genes®
use of Natural Language. With little or no training, people
were able to structure their thoughts in a much more logical
and robust manner."
Implementation Knowledge Genes® conducted
a series of workshops to capture and disseminate the intellectual
capital of experts within the Jet Engine Test facility.
“This Knowledge was then placed upon a central server,
making it available to members of the engine test facility
in relation to each project. These models were then placed
into the hands of a ‘knowledge officer’ (model
administrator) whose responsibility it is to update and
improve these models in an ongoing capacity.”
Implications "Now when a person has
left, the models produced beforehand are being used as a
template of how the business will operate in the future.
Many projects that were under threat of cancellation or
elongating time scales due to the attrition of staff, are
now able to continue at an unabated pace almost completely
removing the organizational impact of their loss."
Results and Returns For the first time
the defense agency now has a complete understanding about
how each part of a project is pieced together. It is now
understood by all involved. This has led to greatly improved
project procedures and a reduction in the risk caused by
the loss of staff. " …When you work on a project,
Knowledge Genes® encourages you to stay in the ‘solution
phase’ rather than the ‘question phase’."
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