Going back decades, capturing and applying knowledge has been one of the most continually pursued, mission-critical tasks undertaken by industrial companies. New technologies, training, and educational methods have been used to try to transfer tribal knowledge and best practices from individuals to the organization. Results have been mixed at best as individuals have resisted sharing the know-how and expertise they have helped create through years of work. Now, with businesses losing experienced workers while competing in disrupted markets and managing increasingly complex work environments, tribal knowledge is undermining the ability of organizations to survive and succeed.
Digital work environments can effectively address and, perhaps, eliminate these long-standing barriers related to knowledge and expertise. This session will provide working examples of how businesses are using data-driven methods to harness stranded knowledge. Examples include:
- Digital knowledge bases can be built and leveraged to overcome skills gaps between younger and more experienced workers
- Analytics can be applied to discover, crowd source, contextualize, and share knowledge from disparate sources that are often tightly siloed, collected but rarely ever used, or not part of an “active” knowledge base
- Subject matter experts can harness data to identify and implement best practices
- Digital techniques can deliver prescriptive feedback to support the point of decision by enabling machines and humans to interact using common language