Who To Ask?

We do investigations before we put up recommendations. We need to know whether policies allow for this and that. We are not clear who we can ask. You wonder whom you should send queries to. Sometimes people have left and you’re not aware. We asked departments whom we should write to. Recently, I found out that the answer was given to us 2 years ago. For different policies, you have to write to different people and you have to remember who to write to.

Know-Who Mattered More than Know-How

Here’s a success story but not in the way you would expect. My boss realized that a retired employee had really critical knowledge of how to set up call centres, so he asked me to go visit her and “do” some knowledge transfer. I said we needed to do something more structured in a team context but he didn’t want to be bothered with the details, he said “just go and do it”. So we invited her to come into the office for a day, and I got the other members of the team in. She said she’d be very happy to tell us all about it, but that she wasn’t the only person who knew this. She was able to identify several people who also had this knowledge, and the parts of the business they had moved to. So my boss was very happy, and he pulled those people back to help him. In the end it wasn’t her knowledge of the call centres that was helpful, it was her knowledge of other people who also knew.

It's not in the files

It was quite shocking when I first started work here. I expected to be orientated, but instead I was told to read files. One can read files, but they don’t tell you the story behind them. When you really need to know something, then you search high and low for someone who knows

Who knows?

It’s not so much about knowledge sharing but access. If info resides in humans, I wouldn’t know who to look for. For example, Task A and B. Who do I ask? I can’t email the whole department to ask. It would be weird. So knowing who has the info, that intimidates me. I sent emails to different individuals but I still haven’t got the info.