Our series of blog posts on the five types of corporate blogs has looked at executive blogs and blogs written by subject matter experts. This post introduces the concept of facilitated blogging – the use of designated employees to extract tacit knowledge from hands-on employees and publish this as a blog.
In many organizations, the employees who are most knowledgeable about how work actually gets done are among the least likely to write blogs. This may be due to limited computer access, temperament, linguistic skills or job responsibilities. A classic example is the oil worker who understands in great detail the tactic knowledge required to operate an oil rig but spends zero time in an office. He or she is also probably approaching retirement age. How can this tacit knowledge be captured and passed on to new employees?
Facilitated blogging is one approach. It’s simple in concept: assign an inexpensive resource to interview hands-on workers about the key activities involved in their job. Publish the results as informal blogs on the corporate intranet.
Business Benefits
Facilitated blogging has one objective: capture the tacit knowledge of hands on workers and make it available to others in the organization. This need is increasingly urgent as baby boomers exit the work force and millennial employees are hired in their place. As noted in David Long’s book “Lost Knowledge”:
- By 2011, the median age of workers in Canada will be 41 years and 36.5 years in the US.
- The U.S. Department of Defense expects 75% of civilian employees to retire between 2002 and 2008
- One-third of all secondary school teachers in the U.S. are expected to retire by 2008
- More than 60 percent of employees in the oil and gas industry will retire by 2010
Successfully transferring tacit knowledge from boomers to millennial recruits will be a driver of success for corporations in all verticals.
Who Authors Blogs Capturing Tacit Knowledge?
Blog posts are written by articulate but junior employees assigned to the task. Think unemployed philosophy and English literature grads. Ideally they have sufficient understanding of the industry to ask hands on workers intelligent questions and convey answers effectively.
The Risks of Facilitated Blogging
Risks associated with this internal blogging strategy take two forms:
- Financial
Effectively capturing tacit knowledge requires organizations to make an investment in interviewers and writers. If the strategy works, this investment will be recouped over the next decade as boomers retire. Some organizations may be uncomfortable with the risk associated with this lengthy pay back cycle.
- Veracity
It is remarkably hard to really capture in words how individuals do hands on activities – as anyone who has struggled to learn a line of business application from the manual will attest. Incomplete or incorrect capture of tacit knowledge may be worse than not capturing this information at all. (But see comments below for ways to address this.)
Additional Thoughts on Facilitated Blogging
Some types of activities do not lend themselves to description in text. These can be relatively straight forward (packing groceries into a paper bag) or complicated (landing an aircraft). In other cases, employees may not be comfortable being interviewed about their positions, feeling challenged to articulate what they do and why they do it. In these cases, consider:
- Podcasts
- Quick and dirty video
These approaches have the advantage of capturing actual activities – and can overcome the veracity risk described above. Unfortunately, search engines do a poor job of indexing both video and audio, so significant efforts need to be made to wrap accurate meta-data around these digital assets. There’s no point in capturing knowledge if the result can’t be found.
So pay great attention to wrapping the digital assets with solid meta-data and then work hard to tune your search engine (whether it’s Google Search Appliance, Microsoft Search Server or something else).