Capturing knowledge in a distributed organisation

I've just got back from a few days on holiday. Synop (being a busy organisation) hasn't stopped working just because I'm not here thankfully. As a company with offices distributed across the country, we rely on daily standups (borrowed from agile software development methodologies) to keep us all in the loop with what's going on. However, when we go away for a week at a time, a whole lot of stuff can happen. Today while catching up with what's been going on in the blogosphere, I caught up first with what Synop people have been writing about in their blogs. Most exciting of all to me was Nathan's news that FAQTs has been fixed at last. This is exciting news indeed, as it's been on our list of important but not urgent things to address for some time.

The reason I draw attention to it is that it serves as an excellent story (Dave Pollard's Principle 9 for Knowledge Management) to illustrate why knowledge capture is so important in a distributed organisation. I'll define a distributed organisation to be one where you don't either see or speak to everyone in the organisation every day. It may be that I would have found out about the change to FAQTs either serendipitously or by Nathan telling me about it. But I couldn't rely on it. Whereas, once he wrote it down, it became available for me to discover on my own, at a time convenient to me.

Providing people with an ability to record significant events in their daily worklife is invaluable. If Synop was an organisation 20 times larger than it currently is, we might need a small team of information editors to gather together interesting news for company-wide dissemination. (This is the role Richard describes as an A-list conduit.) In the meantime, we can rely on subscribing to individual feeds.

Recording the interesting events of course is not sufficient. You also need ways to archive and search the information so that other people can discover it in the future. Lastly you need ways of converting the short term contextual information which is important from a long term historical perspective into a distilled and structured format.