In my previous post, I discussed how knowledge management was an important aspect of transition management.  I discussed the use of content management systems to help organize documentation to make it easier for the next person in a position to learn from the person who just vacated the position.  This is especially important when the person who left is no longer available to transfer his knowledge to the new person.

But having documentation available really doesn’t solve many transition management issues.  Effective transition management requires knowledge and documentation is really only information.  Various points of information must be integrated to become knowledge.

A case in point is a Visio diagram.  These diagrams are useful for visualizing a process or a system implementation.  They lack depth of information about the things they depict.  That information is likely found in a separate document, spreadsheet, or presentation.  Unfortunately, a decision-maker must have possession and understanding of both documents in order to move forward.  That can be a challenge even when a content management system is employed because it is possible that each document was stored without relating it to the other making their association next to impossible to discern.

I know there are applications that are designed to bridge this gap.  They started out as computer-aided systems engineering (CASE) tools and have evolved into enterprise architecture (EA) suites.   I think these tools are generally directed toward IT professionals for building computer systems.  I don’t think these tools are  generalized enough to address a larger topic like transition management.

Effective transition management requires knowledge,  complete understanding actually, about the current state and the future state.  When transitioning people, the future state can be as simple as the current state operation with new people operating it.  Transition management would employ gap analysis to create a plan for getting the new people up to speed.  When transitioning processes, the transition management plan would be to create a gap analysis of what needs to be done and when to move from the old process flow to the new one.  This would include process initiations, process retirements, and training.

Knowledge is defined in the Free Dictionary as the sum or range of what has been perceived, discovered, or learned.  I really like this definition because it speaks to the importance of both strategy (forward thinking) and experience (recollection).

The field of “knowledge management” was really big about 10-15 years ago.  This wave of technology in search of a problem introduced words like “taxonomy”, “collaboration”, and “codification” to the IT lexicon.  Companies rose and fell based on ideas such as whether an enterprise really needed to get two “experts” within its far-flung employment to talk to each other and how they found each other.

The point of managing knowledge in order to manage transition is to make documentation about what an enterprise does and why and where it wants to go and how available to the people who need it. This documentation is not a single book, it’s a library of books and those books aren’t just written prose.  They’re narratives, manuals, pictures, diagrams, and presentations.  Most enterprises have these things.  The problem is that they’re not organized and not readily available.  These artifacts are strewn all over each enterprise’s network as unstructured documents in shared and unshared folders.  A third problem is that they aren’t integrated.

Many enterprises overcome the organization and availability issues through the use of a content management system (CMS). This allows the employees who follow those transitioning of other responsibilities to more easily learn the nuances of their new responsibilities because the knowledge of the previous workers is made available to them.  This is of course dependent of whether the previous person documented appropriately and placed his documentation in the CMS with the proper indexes and key words.

But content management systems don’t force this knowledge to be integrated in a meaningful way.  It is up to the new employee to determine what he needs to know at a given period and why he needs to know it.  Integration of an enterprise’s knowledge is also important for the the other part of transition management – changing what we do.  I’ll write about this topic next time.