Knowledge stewardship is defined as the responsibility of executive management, acting as the agent for the company’s shareholders, to manage and safeguard the knowledge assets that are under their control. Knowledge stewardship is about preserving corporate knowledge and productivity and involves both a strategy for identifying, inventorying, and quantifying the value of the organization’s intellectual assets, and the processes and practices necessary for protecting and enhancing their value over time.
Most organizations are beginning to recognize that enterprise knowledge is a precious asset. New streams of value can be derived when knowledge is captured, amplified, applied, packaged, and distributed in new and creative ways (see the sections on Knowledge-Based Innovation and Knowledge Monetization).
Unfortunately, most companies receive a failing grade for their knowledge stewardship activities. Preserving and protecting knowledge assets has not received the attention of senior executives. Large organizations spend hundreds of millions of dollars on security to protect their physical plant, property, and equipment, and smaller amounts on protecting software, databases, and patent and trademark portfolios. But in most organizations, safeguarding the vast majority of intellectual and knowledge assets—those that reside in the heads of every employee—has not yet become a top priority.
Employment Lifecycle
On an individual employee level, knowledge stewardship involves the creation of a persistent, living set of knowledge resources that support and enable work activities throughout the full employment lifecycle (recruitment, selection, training, performance improvement, professional development, succession, and transition). Examples of specific knowledge resources include expertise directories to support the new hire onboarding process and e-Learning courses and communities of practice to support ongoing professional development.
The return on investment in knowledge stewardship is a dramatic increase in the productivity of every employee during their entire tenure, arising from having access to and leverage of the company’s accumulated expertise. We have found that moderate investments in preserving corporate knowledge tend to pay great dividends.
Lost Knowledge
Most modern enterprises are facing an impending crisis in terms of dealing with their aging workforce. We characterize the aging workforce issue as a “crisis” for two reasons. First, there is increased recognition that the value of an enterprise is fundamentally related to the aggregate knowledge of its employees. Second, in some departments, business units, and companies, the rate of retirements and departures will exceed 50 percent or more within the next 10 years. The impact of this lost knowledge—the skills, learnings, relationships, and capabilities that are lost when experienced workers leave the enterprise—is especially critical for future success. How the executive leadership team responds to this challenge today will have a significant impact on the organization’s long-term health and viability.
Numerous organizational challenges are involved in dealing with an aging workforce and with the issues involved in ensuring stability and continuity when people leave an organization. We focus on the impact of an aging workforce in industrialized societies now as there is a clear window of opportunity for strategic, proactive intervention; and this window will not last indefinitely. Seizing this moment of opportunity requires bringing knowledge stewardship into the foreground in order to address these issues from a strategic perspective.
Iknow’s Services
Iknow has guided numerous clients through all of the strategic and operational aspects of knowledge stewardship. We provide the following services:
- Knowledge Harvesting (also called Knowledge Mapping or Knowledge Preservation). Knowledge harvesting is the comprehensive process of capturing implicit, undocumented knowledge from experts and top performers in an organization. Iknow performs all steps of the knowledge harvesting process, capturing the knowledge, competencies, and know-how that is essential for enabling your business strategy.
- Knowledge Representation. We translate the outputs from the knowledge harvesting process into the optimal structures and formats for storage, retrieval, and reuse. Representations can be as simple as text summaries, after action reviews (AARs), and process flow diagrams, or be quite complicated representations for content repositories, enterprise search, and computer-based, automated reasoning.
- Content Architecture. We design, develop, and implement the structure, or framework, for organizing, classifying, and storing all types of enterprise content. These structures enable the effective capture, search, interaction, retrieval, and delivery of content. Business value arises from the ability to find, share, and reuse the right information, more quickly, when needed.
- Knowledge Dissemination. We help companies select and implement knowledge management software products that provide access to knowledge. Knowledge dissemination can be accomplished with technologies and tools such as content management, document management, enterprise search, portals, e-Learning, and collaboration software, and automated e-mail distribution based on personal profiles.
- Knowledge Governance Processes and Organization. We help companies establish the business processes and organizational structures to provide the on-going support infrastructure for knowledge stewardship. Over time, most knowledge assets degrade and become obsolete, so the appropriate processes, roles, and organizational infrastructure is necessary to manage the knowledge base.
Iknow Project Summary – Knowledge Stewardship
A recent knowledge stewardship assignment is described below to give you an idea of the type and breadth of work we can undertake. A complete project summary can be downloaded by clicking on the document's title or on the image to the left.
Developing a Strategy for Knowledge Stewardship
Harnessing the intellectual capital in a large consulting firm
A well-known consulting firm had no comprehensive approach for preserving corporate knowledge. Iknow was selected to assist in the design of the overall intellectual capital program. (PDF, 86 KB)
Please see our Project Portfolio for more examples of recent client assignments.
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