Year
2007
Abstract
There is an increasing awareness in organizations such the IAEA for the need to be proactive in capturing knowledge from staff members who are leaving the organization or affected by the rotation policy. There are three categories of knowledge to be captured: • task-related (e.g., knowledge of how to perform maintenance on a device ) • job-related (e.g., knowledge of how to perform a job properly) • strategy-related (e.g., knowledge of why certain corporate decisions were made) A previous paper [Ref 1] discussed practical techniques for capturing knowledge for taskrelated information. This paper presents a practical approach to capturing knowledge for the second and third categories: job related and strategy-related information. In brief, the approach requires a designated individual or group whose task it is to capture the knowledge required to perform a job successfully, and to interview senior staff for capturing and documenting the strategy or practices that have been used to arrive at high level corporate decision. Several incumbents of a specific job are interviewed in a structured manner. The structured approach provides an auditable mechanism which is designed to elicit the key features of knowledge which have to be captured. The output of the interviews provides the raw material from which the job can be fully documented, thus capturing the required knowledge. The knowledge from senior staff would be captured in a similar manner. The next step is to process the captured knowledge in such a fashion as to make it available for reference by staff, and to allow training programs to be designed which support the knowledge and skills identified in the knowledge capture process. This latter aspect ensures that the knowledge is stored and disseminated in an orderly, systematic manner. The paper presents the application of structured interviewing of IAEA inspectors of nuclear facilities, and senior IAEA staff at headquarters, including knowledge processing, storage and dissemination.