Retention
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Contents
Definition
Retention is The process of keeping knowledge in an organization
Summary
Knowledge retention relates to keeping explicit and tacit knowledge in the organization, usually on long term. Retaining tacit knowledge may focus on capturing tacit knowledge, usually a very difficult task, or trying to retain people with the requested knowledge in the organization. A re-hire program for retirees may yield significant benefits. Long-term storage of explicit knowledge requires robust and reliable devices to meet archiving requirements.
Description
Knowledge retention relates to keeping explicit and tacit knowledge in the organization, usually on long term.
Retaining tacit knowledge
The efforts to retain tacit knowledge are usually closely connected with the identification of critical knowledge and the analysis of the risk of knowledge loss. The means of retaining tacit knowledge are twofold: if possible, the knowledge may be captured (see the Capture-article for a description of methods) and the resulting documents stored in an appropriate repository, and/or transferred. This may go hand in hand with efforts to maintain people who have the requested knowledge in the organization. A good working environment as well as a reward and recognition system may persuade experts to remain in the organization. Strategies to re-engage retired experts, assigning them the task to transfer knowledge to younger staff, may yield significant benefits.
Retaining explicit knowledge
Document management systems and content management systems are widely used for storing information and documents. These repositories are efficient for handling a dynamically changing database, with frequent additions, changes, or deletions. For long-term storage however, robust and reliable devices are required for archiving purposes. Electronic or digital formats can be stored on hard discs, optical media (CD, DVD, etc.), streamers (magnetic tapes) and/or in a film library. These could be read-only or editable, full text or just abstracts. For information stored in databases, database design should consider ease of retrieval in the future using metadata, thesauri, taxonomies, ontology, etc. Integrated information systems provide interoperability of different knowledge formats, including text, data, drawings, videos, and/or 3-D models. The information can be classified by author, release number, date of production, subject and/or keywords. Computer aided metadata creation tools can also be used to create metadata automatically for knowledge resources. A combination of the following software/system tools can be used in the implementation of electronic or digital archives:
- Add-ons which provide archiving functionality for document and content management systems
- Commercial relational database management systems (RDBMS), such as ORACLE, MSSQL, SYBASE, etc.;
- Intranet technology;
- Custom in-house RDBMS systems;
- Open source RDBMS, such as MySQL.
Example
The IAEA’s International Nuclear Information System (INIS) [1] offers a very good example of data storage methods and tools.
References
[2] INTERNATIONAL ATOMIC ENERGY AGENCY, Comparative Analysis of Methods and Tools for Nuclear Knowledge Preservation, Nuclear Energy Series No. NG-T-6.7 STI/PUB/1494, 2011
