FREE online courses on Knowledge Management - Auditing Knowledge

 

If knowledge is an asset, it has to be managed just the same as the financial and physical assets of the Industrial Age were managed. It is estimated that 70 to 80 percent of what our workers know is hidden. We don't know what we know and we don't know who knows it.

 

Can you imagine such a scenario in the Industrial Age? If an organization didn't know what its tangible assets were or who had them, it was likely headed for bankruptcy? Even though much of knowledge is intangible, it is the primary asset and the knowledge audit is an essential precursor to managing it.

 

Here are some of the basic questions of a knowledge audit:

 

• What does your organization know?
• What doesn't it know?
• Who needs to know it?
• Who knows what?
• Are they inside or outside the organization?
• Do your leaders understand knowledge?
• The value of knowledge?
• Are they leading by example?
• Does your organization systematically organize and transfer knowledge internally?
• Is it systematically acquiring and sharing knowledge outside the organization?
• Are you creating new knowledge?
• Are you leveraging knowledge to benefit your members and the association?
• Do you measure, assign value to the knowledge asset?
• Is your work environment knowledge friendly?

 

Restructuring for knowledge

 

One of the reasons our knowledge is hidden is a top-down and fragmented organizational structure. With few exceptions, associations will discover through a knowledge audit that they are poorly organized to do business in the Knowledge Age. Unless they've recently restructured with knowledge management in mind, their operations are likely patterned after the top-down hierarchies of an industrial past.