Don’t Lose Your Institutional Memory

  Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned   Risk Management   ProjectsAtWork  

A subset of knowledge management, technical succession planning is a process that identifies an organization’s critically important information, who possesses it, and how to pass it on to others if they leave. Here is a seven-step model for implementing a technical succession planning program, and suggestions for overcoming some inevitable barriers.

Human capital is today's key to economic growth and well-being. Talent, understood to mean the unique gifts an individual possesses, is essential to competitive advantage. Talent resides with people because machines, though helpful, cannot yet think, invent, or create. What people know and do — and how they apply their talents to achieve competitive advantage — is essential to the founding of companies, the creation of jobs, and the sustainment of both organizations and nations.

But human talent is a "wasting asset." It does not waste in the same way as fresh fruits, machines, or capital assets diminish in value, or waste away. But it wastes nevertheless because people die, become disabled, resign from their jobs, or retire from the workforce. When that happens, what they know and have learned from experience can be lost — unless organizations take steps to capture and transfer the knowledge of these people to others who can use that knowledge. And yet some research indicates that fewer than …

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