Great e-mail Maarja! Knowledge Management (KM) which is near and dear to my heart, along with records and information management of course. Succession planning is something we all should be thinking about, right now! Corporate amnesia is happening as we speak! Where I work here it is estimated that 30 - 35% of employees will be retiring within the next 3 years or so. With them they take their knowledge, their expertise, their years of experience, insight, best practices and lessons learned.
The explicit information or knowledge is easier to capture, as this resides in databases and corporate repositories. It is the tacit information and knowledge which is the real challenge. This type of knowledge can only be gained through years of personal experience. As an example, we all have a guru in our office who has been around awhile and we always go to them. You may be this person.
What does this have to do with records management, you might be asking yourself? We have to work together with RM professionals, to come up with methodologies and tools to capture and codify this knowledge, so that it may be accessible for those who come after our departed colleagues.
Cheers
John A. Gervais
Program Manager
Policy and Guidelines Section
Information Policy and Governance Division
Statistics and Information Management Directorate
Corporate Strategies and Business Development Branch
Canada Revenue Agency
320 Queen St., Place de Ville, Tower A, 6th Fl.,
Ottawa, ON, Canada, K1A 0L5
Tel: 1-613-946-0245
Facsimile: 1-613-941-9649
E-mail: mailto:[log in to unmask]
-----Original Message-----
From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: June 27, 2006 12:39 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Knowledge management [Was Re: [RM] RAINdrip: Wonder if reading
through 25 year old e-mails will evoke the same feelings....
This discussion has gotten me thinking. When you are working within
your organizations to ensure the retention of electronic records, what
kind of input are you getting from the end users --- not just in the
near term, but also those who work with knowledge in long arcs. I
don't mean just talking to the people in the records creating offices.
I know you do that. Of course, the people in the records creating
office often will not be the ones whose successors will be fielding
complex internal inquiries in the future. I'm thinking instead of the
people whose successors will be on the other end of the phone when the
head of your organization or your General Counsel calls up and needs to
trace some information or knowledge 20 years from now.
The people receiving internal and external inquiries are likely to be
in house lawyers, archivists, corporate historians, etc. How much
input do you get from them in considering issues related to the
preservation of electronic knowledge? Are you able to analyze the
types of questions that your historians, archivists, and lawyers have
been answering over the longterm? For example, do you have an
opportunity to read and examine for reference patterns the policy
papers and analyses that they have been required to write? Or to talk
to them about the type of reference inquiries they have been answering
in house? I'm curious how you are ensuring that the information they
accessed in the days of hard copy records will be preserved in the
digital age.
This sounds like a no brainer but you would be surprised what might
fall through the cracks. I'm thinking not about items that you are
legally compelled to keep, but about the other sources which typically
form part of an organization's insitutional memory. Consider, for
example, some of the items that once were accessioned into and made
available in an organization's library. Many of these were
publications, something you assumed the librarians would take care of
preserving.
Take internal telephone directories, for example. In many
organizations, these once were published once or twice a year. So, if
needed, you could use them to confirm that Person X headed Unit Y in
Division Z from approximately June of 1965 to December of 1973. As an
historian, I find old published directories useful to look up
information when an internal requester asks for something that hinges
in part on when someone worked in a particular unit. Or where a
function was placed several realignments ago. The same is true for
going to the library to look at old policy manuals, binders of internal
directives, etc.
Nowadays, an organization is likely to be posting organizational
telephone directories, manual updates, directives, etc. on its internal
webpage as dynamic content. Maybe your organization has stopped
producing these in hard copy. Your library may no longer have any hard
copies to accession into its collections. So who is saving them and
how?
Is someone making sure that the various iterations of the web-based
directories, manuals, etc., which once were in the purview of
librarians, still are being saved? Are your organizations working to
develop reference portals that preserve rather than simply overwrite
dynamic information? Or will your historians, archivists, and lawyers
be stuck shrugging their shoulders and telling an irate requester 20
years from now, "no one thought to preserve that information when we
went electronic. We can't trace the information you want, there's a
knowledge gap for that time period." Hopefully, that won't happen with
a matter in litigation, I know I would hate to be the one who has to
say,"ooops, that's long gone, no one kept that once our Library stopped
accessioning hard copies."
Just wondering -- a by-product of the old paper versus electronic
debate. Any thoughts are welcoem!
Maarja
________________________________________________________________________
Check out AOL.com today. Breaking news, video search, pictures, email
and IM. All on demand. Always Free.
List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html
Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance
List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html
Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance
|
