Knowledge Capture and Transfer are integral activities for all organizations – specifically those that invest in knowledge management programs. Even with the introduction of new technologies like Generative AI, semantic search, and knowledge graphs, the need to enable knowledge to flow among experts, and the ability for organizations to capture, disseminate, and use its institutional knowledge remain a business imperative –  in fact, knowledge capture and transfer are foundational in making these technologies succeed. Opportunities to maximize competitive advantages, find operational efficiencies, and organizational learning are all enabled through the capture, flow, and application of knowledge. One of the traditional definitions for knowledge management is delivering knowledge resources to the right people at the right time. What happens when it doesn’t? When knowledge is impeded from flowing across the organization, business processes and operations slow down, your team members feel less equipped to perform, and the organization has to spend more resources on making up for avoidable mistakes. Here are some of the challenges that organizations, teams, and individuals face when knowledge is not effectively captured or transferred throughout the organization:

Knowledge transfer and capture can be deceivingly simple, but few organizations get it right. EK engages organizations to establish sustainable and scalable methods of ensuring knowledge is captured, stored, and transferred across employees in a timely and effective manner. EK leverages its extensive experience supporting over 200 organizations,  using design thinking techniques and approaches grounded in Agile principles to design and implement successful Knowledge Capture and Transfer programs uniquely tailored to your business needs, organizational culture, and operational environment.Your organization will benefit from a reduction in siloed information. This will result in an accelerated flow of information, an enhanced knowledge-sharing culture, and increased collaboration within teams and across departments.

Our Services and Approach

We understand that your organization is at a unique stage in its knowledge capture and transfer journey. Regardless of where you stand, our team of experts is ready to support you. We offer various engagement options to ensure you maximize the benefits of your efforts. 

Assessment and Benchmarking: We begin with understanding your environment and partnering with you to identify the biggest opportunities based on your organization’s needs. Within a matter of weeks, our team will employ our proven discovery and analysis benchmarks to prioritize opportunities according to the expected business value, enabling us to quickly demonstrate value to KM sponsors and your organizational stakeholders.

Rapid Pilots: Next, we develop and implement appropriately scaled pilots in your environment. These quick achievable initiatives help contextualize proven practices for knowledge transfer and capture. Pilots are categorized based on organizational readiness and resource maturity needs into low-tech (human-to-human only with minimal technology), medium-tech (hybrid), or high-tech (requiring some automation/augmentation) and yield lessons that can be incorporated in future iterations of knowledge capture and transfer.

Enterprise Roadmap:  We conclude the engagement by charting a path forward, and enabling you and your team to execute selected knowledge capture and transfer activities in the future – a strategy and roadmap that lay out a plan for you to implement knowledge capture and transfer activities with confidence, scaling up beyond the initial pilot and enabling knowledge to flow across your organization to where it is needed.

Embedded Advisory and Consulting: Our embedded advisory and consulting services integrate our experts directly into your organization to provide continuous, hands-on guidance and support. By working alongside your teams, we ensure that knowledge capture and transfer initiatives are not only effectively implemented and sustained, but also deliver the organizational impacts you expect. Our consultants bring industry best practices, tailored strategies, and real-time problem-solving to your day-to-day operations, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and knowledge sharing. This embedded approach allows us to respond to emerging needs, adjust strategies in real-time, and ensure that your knowledge management efforts align with your evolving business goals.

Expertise and Impact: EK provides globally recognized, best-in-class knowledge management experts who understand the challenges of increasingly complex business landscapes. Knowledge is often the most challenging asset to measure and manage, but our consultants bring years of experience in assessing, planning, and building effective solutions tailored to specific environments. As a result of our partnership, clients can expect accelerated information flow within and between groups, a stronger knowledge-sharing culture, and increased collaboration across the organization.

Investing in  Knowledge Capture and Transfer Programs

Knowledge Capture & Transfer activities introduce systematic and sustainable approaches for employees and teams to share their experiences, resources, and learnings. These activities establish new pathways for communication and collaboration by breaking down organizational silos. Most importantly, these activities focus on defining ways to capture and institutionalize knowledge so that it can be made available to others in the future.

Let’s revisit the business challenges and how Knowledge Capture and Transfer practices solve them:

Challenge: Retaining exceptional employees

Knowledge capture and transfer:  

• Provides information consistency regardless of employee location or schedule;
• Strengthens partnerships between individuals/teams;
• Reduces silos leading to increased organizational efficiency;
• Smooths out knowledge gaps due to inconsistent workforce availability;
• Reduces employee frustration; and
• Frees up experts’ time.

Challenge: Lack of cross-functional collaboration, existence of knowledge silos, and duplication of organizational effort

Knowledge capture and transfer:  

• Affords greater visibility into ongoing efforts across the organization;
• Accelerates sharing of lessons learned and procedural knowledge;
• Expands knowledge by adding to existing content; and
• Creates opportunities to form trusted relationships with colleagues.

Challenge: Foster the success of enterprise AI

Knowledge capture and transfer:  

• Facilitates the deliberate and systematic capture of individuals’ and communities’ knowledge, in a structured, domain-specific, and machine-readable format;
• Ensures knowledge from under-represented groups within the organization is better captured in institutional repositories, and leveraged for AI and decision-making; and
• Offers the contextual understanding necessary for tailoring responses or recommendations based on how content is generated and consumed.

Challenge: Ineffective onboarding for new hires; lack of effective performance management for existing employees

Knowledge capture and transfer:  

• Improves access to SME knowledge regardless of geographic location or time zone;
• Enables a consistent information experience for all employees;
• Allows the organization to set and communicate standards of performance;
• Reduces risk via improved compliance for critical business processes; and
• Facilitates faster, more accurate knowledge transfer for time-critical scenarios e.g. knowledge transfer at shift change.

Challenge: Difficulty making data-informed decisions

Knowledge capture and transfer:  

• Increases awareness of data availability;
• Simplifies data submission leading to single-source data as appropriate;
• Simplifies or unifies data access; and
• Increases awareness of data gaps and availability.

Challenge: Duplicative, ineffective thought leadership efforts

Knowledge capture and transfer:  

• Strengthens idea generation through collaboration;
• Facilitates consistent access to innovation activities for all employees; and
• Clears up understanding of and alignment around organizational priorities.

What Knowledge Capture and Transfer Looks Like

The choice of activities depends on multiple variables that EK consultants will consider throughout our engagement with you.

Typical Knowledge Capture and Transfer program options can include the following types of activities:

Knowledge Creation and Knowledge Sharing Forums

Tap into your organization’s collective knowledge through structured forums with diverse participants, guided by skilled facilitators in a people- and knowledge-centered approach to produce insights, document outcomes, and suggest actionable solutions.

• Knowledge Cafes – A forum that brings a group of people together to share experiences, learn from each other, build relationships and break down organizational silos.
• Ask Me Anything (AMA) Discussions – Discussions- ranging from panel discussions to focus groups or one-on-one interviews, find out the answers to a prepared set of questions directly from a Subject Matter Expert within an organization. 
• Peer Assists – A facilitated, face-to-face working session where colleagues from different teams can share their experiences and knowledge in preparation for an upcoming project with a similar objective and/or challenge.
• After Action Reviews – Provides a framework for teams to “learn in the moment” and transfer knowledge immediately into the work at hand, as opposed to learning after a project or activity is complete.
• Retrospectives – A meeting held after a task, project, or major project milestone. These meetings can take many forms and ask probing questions aimed at identifying valuable lessons for future work.

Collaborative Learning, Mentoring, and On-the-Job Training

Disseminate best practices, lessons learned, know-how, and know-why, and promote learning through strengthening knowledge networks and developing formal mentorship and job shadowing programs. Alongside EK experts, you will define clear objectives, design training resources, identify KPIs to regularly monitor progress, and develop continuous feedback mechanisms for improvement.

• Job Shadowing – A formal or informal program designed to facilitate knowledge transfer from an employee to other personnel. (For more technical roles: Pair Programming is a development technique in which two people work together at one workstation; they both take turns working and reviewing.)
• Mentoring – A formal program that pairs established employees with new hires to provide professional and organizational development support.
• Communities of Practice (CoPs) –  A group of people who share a common interest in an area of knowledge, problem, or discipline and convene to share information, improve processes, and work to achieve their group and individual goals.

Workshops and Training Programs

Encourage sense-making, foster innovation, and generate key insights through focused expert-led workshops featuring interactive elements tailored to your organization’s needs.

• Ideation Workshops – Focused problem-solving workshops seeking to get alignment on the pressing issues facing teams within your organization, co-developing approaches to overcome them, and planning for the deployment and adoption of solutions.
• Knowledge Capture Techniques Workshop: Workshops focused on methods such as storytelling, interviews, and process mapping to capture hidden knowledge, or knowledge that has otherwise been inaccessible,  within your workforce.
• Knowledge Transfer Planning Workshops: Sessions that help teams develop strategies for transferring critical knowledge about organizational transitions, staff retirements, and other events that may disrupt or put your operations at risk.

Knowledge Documentation and Accessibility

A significant amount of a company’s knowledge will ‘walk out the door’ when key individuals leave the organization. Furthermore, colleagues or information systems cannot leverage knowledge that is not captured and shared. Foster knowledge continuity by building trusted knowledge repositories that contain useful documentation and job aids, that link people to knowledge resources, and provide feedback mechanisms to ensure usability and continuous improvement. These trusted repositories can then feed into more advanced semantic and AI models to help organizations meet more advanced objectives. 

• Documented Job Aids – Provide a centralized cache of role-specific information from which employees can easily draw from at their time of need. (e.g. Knowledge Portal)
• Onboarding & Offboarding Surveys – Provide new hires and exiting employees the opportunity to capture high-value content relevant to their industry experience and institutional knowledge, in addition to providing feedback on the employee experience.
• Implicit Knowledge Capture & Connection – Algorithms and models to mine text documents and/or perform social network analysis of employees’ emails to capture critical knowledge and identify knowledge connections.

Technology-Driven Knowledge Capture

Leverage AI tools to capture and connect critical knowledge, ensuring data privacy and integration with existing systems for ongoing enhancement.

• AI-Powered Knowledge Mapping: Implement AI tools to categorize and connect knowledge across various sources automatically.
• Skill Gap Analysis: Leverage AI to analyze employee skills and identify gaps, recommending training and resources to fill these gaps and capture knowledge accordingly.

Document Aggregation and Summarization: Deploy AI to automatically summarize lengthy documents, reports, and meeting minutes, making it easier to capture and transfer key points and action items.