Knowledge Health Checks
VALUE OF INTELLECTUAL ASSETS
The most important aspect of knowledge management is recognising the value of intellectual assets – information and knowledge available within an organisation, and then finding a way to harness it fully to one’s benefit.
Some common questions that often give rise to recognising the importance of this value are:
- How can we be more effective without increasing our existing resources?
- We have a new document management system but still have trouble finding what we need and when we need it?
- Recruitment, training and retention costs are constantly increasing. When an experienced human resource eventually leaves our organisation we lose some important knowledge. How can we benefit from that individual’s learning before he or she exits?
Typically, organisations approach these questions reactively. They assign an individual or team to sort matters out but the results are, often than not, ineffective. That is so because of the recurring nature of such problems.
From Digital Summit’s perspective, problems of this genre are best tackled by adopting a knowledge management health check approach. It is a proactive discipline which aligns people, processes and solutions to overall organisational objectives.
RESOLVING RECURRING PROBLEMS
There are 5 key areas Digital Summit focuses on that contribute to resolving recurring problems brought about by knowledge shifts and periodic changes in technology. These are:
- Auditing environment: Infrastructure including hardware and operating environment;
- Auditing repository systems: Database & Database Server Configuration (i.e., SQL Server & Oracle);
- Auditing business systems: Such as – Client Management Systems, Financial Manage-ment Systems;
- Auditing business continuity plans: Backup and Recovery; and,
- Auditing infrastructure & Database security.
Taken holistically together, the resulting work we do in all these areas enables organ-isations to fully harness the value of its intellectual assets in a more proactive manner.