Posted by Denham on April 06, 2002 at 11:36:30:

In Reply to: Future Techniques and KnowledgeMapping in manufacturing corporations posted by Florian Resatsch on April 06, 2002 at 07:48:02:

Greetings Florian,

Here are some things to consider:

Find and support communities where that special engineering and materials knowledge can reside. Collect stories, symptoms, tips, tricks, heuristics, apply industrial engineering techniques e.g. causal analysis or PFMEA (process failure modes and effects analysis). Capture the key distinctions before they are lost - mostly this will be around paradigms, mental models, patterns, assumptions and beliefs.

Build relationships and networks so all the expertise does not walk away forever on retirement, e.g. alumni clubs, support mentoring and apprenticeships to improve continuous learning at the workface.

Certainly there are tools to help with ontology bootstrapping, auto-updating of yellowpages and expertise locators (Autonomy, Tacit, AskMe, RagingKnowledge and more). Some new approaches are blogging (weblogs) and IM (also available on mobile devices).

Social network analysis is one way to 'get a picture' of emergent groups, clusters and to pin-point maverns, isolates and brokers. Take a look at the work of Valdis Krebs. Automated analysis of intranet traffic is one way to gather the data - use parsers to examine and analyse server logs

Some possible advice:
Concentrate on the boundary objects that move meaning between departments, functions and communities use these to provide a framework for your knowledge mapping.

Spend your time finding and mapping social networks rather than locating document repositories. Balance the attention you give external and internal knowledge flows, both are critical to understanding expertise and locating knowledge related opportunities.

Collecting key knowledge from dispersed localities with a rich history, takes time and large resources. Automated tools will not help you get to the deep meaning and the tacit clues that enable sense-making, rapid responses, awareness and innovation. I suggest you will need to become immersed and engaged in those communities to really find the valuable stuff.

Good luck.

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