Just-in-time Knowledge Capture Techniques

Organizations struggling to retain “corporate memory” are faced with several challenges. Some of the most skilled employees have learned on the job and there is no documentation or formal training material that covers their area of expertise. It can be both timeconsuming and expensive to produce full-blown educational materials (training videos, multimedia presentations, detailed user manuals, etc). This paper describes several low-cost, low-tech knowledge capture techniques that can be used by virtually any organization. It advocates a method of “guerilla knowledge gathering” that is rooted in “guerilla reporting” tactics. Guerilla knowledge gathering does not require professional producers or videographers. Because it makes use of consumerlevel technology, many people can use the equipment with little or no training. Using these techniques moves the focus from high-end production values to content-rich data gathering. In conclusion, this paper describes strategy and tactics that can help avoid potential pitfalls and improve the knowledge gathering results. It describes the author’s experiences with real-world examples of these techniques.