knowledge risk

Do you lose knowledge and capability when key people leave your organisation?  Use our expertise to help you identify, retain and benefit from must-keep knowledge in your business.

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Knowledge risk identifies the business impact of losing knowledge that is critical to a firm’s performance. Typically, knowledge risk exists where important, organisation-specific knowledge is held only in the heads of individuals and not well represented in policies, processes, rules and practices. Access to significant knowledge is dependent on access to particular people. When people are absent, knowledge is not available to the organisation.

 

Firms have a poor understanding of knowledge risk. A common mistake is to focus on head count (staff numbers and expenses on the payroll) rather than head contents (the valuable knowledge and skills that our firm uses to stay in business).

 

Long-term staff and their rich knowledge provide the safety net for haphazard knowledge practices. Where today’s critical knowledge is known only to a few people, the organisation’s stock of knowledge is diluted as staff leave the firm. Impacts include mistakes and rework, missed opportunities, and fractured relationships.

 

We help companies to focus on jobs, roles and tasks with high knowledge risk (i.e. those with a high component of firm-specific knowledge that is difficult to buy and build, and is not widely held or captured in the firm).

example

assignments

• knowledge risk assessments

• specify and prioritise knowledge risk

• align knowledge risk assessment with business continuity plans

water, roads, transport, education and professional services organisations

clients include

knowledge transfer

Targeted knowledge transfer is the prime tool to mitigate knowledge risk and to capture business benefits of what your experts know.  We work with you and your experts to identify, transfer and share their most important know-how.    

 

We help you specify high business value knowledge that is unique to the expert, difficult to replace and slow to grow.  By focusing on high value knowledge, knowledge transfer becomes a tightly targeted, manageable activity.  

 

The knowable knowledge transfer toolkit is a proven and practical approach to securing expert know-how..  

 

Successful knowledge transfer ensures that critically important knowledge is retained and sustained to benefit your business.   Benefits of knowledge transfer include: retention of valuable, ‘can’t buy’ knowledge when key staff leave; reduced hand over risk through a structured knowledge transfer effort; and better supporting your key staff by building knowledgeable teams around them. 

example

assignments

• help key experts transfer must-save knowledge within the business

• skill your people to identify expert knowledge and facilitate its transfer

finance, engineering, education, government

clients include

lessons learned

The purpose of a lessons learned process is to benefit from our experience.  By reflecting on experience, we can identify successful practices to be replicated, as well as improvement opportunities within and across activities and teams.     

 

Many organisations adopt a process to develop lessons learned.  Sadly, few organisations report that business benefits result.  Instead, poorly defined lessons may languish unused in data bases. 

 

Effective lessons learned design achieves alignment with organisational strategy and objectives, and addresses governance, lesson uptake and measurement.  The challenge is to ensure that appropriate insights reach the heads and hands of those who can benefit, in a timely and actionable format. 

example

assignments

• assess the business benefits of existing lessons learned processes

• design and develop lessons learned processes that optimise business benefits

• facilitate lessons learned reviews for major projects

• skill in-house resources in lessons learned facilitation

regulatory and enforcement agencies, engineering infrastructure, government, professional services

clients include

leveraging expertise

Are you ready to reshape how you think about your organisation, its potential, and how it creates value?   

 

The primary assets of the knowledge economy are recognised as people and their expertise, knowledge processes, and knowledge-based products and services.   Leveraging expertise focuses on the organisation’s intangible, knowledge based assets as a source of competitive advantage.

 

Managing expertise and knowledge capabilities delivers tangible benefits to organisations: operational efficiency, opportunities to better service customer and stakeholder needs, and a springboard for innovation.  At the level of strategy, understanding knowledge assets provides new insights about the organisation’s potential.  True knowledge-focussed organisations drive strategy from their distinctive knowledge capabilities.  For these organisations, building and utilising distinctive corporate knowledge is a key focus.

example

assignments

• intellectual property audits

• strategic review of research & development portfolio

• review of intellectual property commercial performance

• intellectual capital assessment

universities, professional services, civil infrastructure, member organisations, industry bodies, education

clients include