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Page 11 of 13
Guidelines for action
All the basic items now clarified, how long would it take to achieve these results?
It depends on your expectations- and how you manage them.
As noted above, a "big bang" approach is possible if you focus on technology, but then maintaining the knowledge will be more expensive, as the producers will need constant help both to trace back and update the "thesaurised" knowledge.
In any change management activity, you need to change the behaviour of the knowledge producers.
A simple presentation is not enough to produce the change: you also need to reinforce the message with consistent actions.
We suggest a staged approach, using the results from the parameter-definition activities shown above to build up a schedule of intervention that could produce the first results in few months.
Lowering the expectations (better, managing them) implies identifying which organizational units could produce results faster.
Then, a "viral" model could be used to both improve your knowledge retention policy and spread the activity to other organizational units.
The "viral" model is used whenever you want to "evangelise" on a new process or technology:
identify a first structure with a high chance of success; once successful, this structure should "spread" to others, reinforcing the message: usually, the growth is not simply linear.
How do you operate?
Realistically, identify a homogeneous area to tune your approach on, and identify the actual "stakeholders" involved in the knowledge processes: production, collection, distribution, and maintenance.
This approach allows finding if there are any further organizational units that should be involved and to negotiate a process and the roles- e.g. organizational units that have already been assigned similar tasks, or that defined their own knowledge retention policies.
Finally, no knowledge retention policy should allow "loopholes", like using external resources to bypass standards.
The message to both internal and external resources is quite simple: you can delegate the execution of activities, not responsibility, and therefore any organizational unit using external resources should "price" the cost of converting the externally-generated knowledge in order to make it comply with
the internal rules.
Quite often, these additional costs will reduce or remove the economic viability of externalisation, at least for recurring activities.
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