Live Knowledge Transfer

Knowledge transfer can be categorized in two forms, formal and informal. The most common method of live knowledge transfer across companies in all industries is informal interactions between experts and practitioners through a sustained mentoring or apprentice relationship, or through brief discussions by phone or videoconference.

In addition to these informal interactions, many companies in knowledge-intensive industries provide opportunities for formal knowledge transfer. The most common formats are internal conferences, training programs, and meetings of senior people within specific disciplines. Such settings enable an organization to recognize and reward experts who take the time to codify and transmit their knowledge. They also promote the development of material (such as presentations, articles, and training courses) that can be disseminated electronically and thereby serve as a permanent repository of the firm's intellectual property.

Live knowledge transfer is highly effective, but it is often expensive especially it if involves travel. Therefore, most organizations also use electronic means of knowledge transfer that are more scalable.

Electronic Knowledge Transfer

Most knowledge management technology available today focuses on using electronic media to transfer knowledge. The most technology-intensive aspects of knowledge management involve "informal" knowledge transfer (i.e., searching, sorting, filtering, and delivering pieces of documents, e-mail, Web content, and data to many different types of users). The theory behind these products is that the freshest and most dynamic source of knowledge within an organization is the stream of documents, e-mails, and data produced as a normal by-product of conducting business. By filtering, sorting, and re-combining this information, electronic tools can provide access to an organization's intellectual capital with little or no incremental effort by the experts producing this material.

While search engines and other electronic tools are very effective in finding "what's out there" in a given subject area, they don't contain the structure, rigor and conciseness characteristic of an expert's thought process. In addition, there is no way to control or predict what a search engine or e-mail filter will turn up in response to a request, so an organization cannot use these techniques to promote specific ideas or methodologies. Therefore, most organizations with substantial knowledge management initiatives develop more formal or highly engineered methods of knowledge transfer as well. These more formal approaches include:

• Codifying official methodologies and recommended procedures
• Creating primers and other documents to explain important concepts and techniques
• Building intranet sites to deliver the "official" version of sales material, white papers, and other important documents
• Creating simple software applications to lead people through business processes and produce a consistent form of output (e.g., financial advisory software that produces draft trust documents)
• Building expert systems to capture and apply an expert's rule set.

While these more highly engineered approaches tend to be expensive, they are worth applying when an organization is working on high-value business problems and can reduce cost or risk (or improve quality) by using an expert's methodology rather than the ad hoc approaches of more junior practitioners.