Capture

Definition

Capture is The knowledge process that brings data, information, or knowledge into the organizational knowledge base. A process of capturing the knowledge available within an organization and making it available.

Source: Comparative Analysis of Methods and Tools for Nuclear Knowledge Preservation

Description 1

After having identified key knowledge and sources of knowledge, the next step is to formulate procedures to capture them. Capture is related to processes that bring data and information into a knowledge system. The processes will consider the KM life cycle and should address factors such as media, format, speed, costs, volume and intellectual property issues. They should also include alternatives for source capture and guidelines for hardcopy publication, preservation of historical documents, standards and quality control procedures. This stage of the process includes two groups of activities; the first being the capture of tacit knowledge and the second involving the capture of explicit knowledge.

Tacit and implicit knowledge

The capture of tacit and/or implicit knowledge is a more challenging task because such knowledge resides in a person’s capabilities and expertise. It is an accepted truth that people are not always so open to sharing what they know, and sometimes they simply do not have time to teach other people. Some good practices used by various organizations to capture tacit knowledge include:

• Conducting interviews of employees which may be critical to an organization’s functions;
• Formulating questionnaires that successfully capture the tacit knowledge of employees;
• Using knowledge mapping;
• Using photography and video recording in capturing actual activities conducted by experts, such as in workshops, seminars, lectures, experiments, etc.;
• Conducting exit interviews with employees leaving the organization about how they carry out their tasks and duties;
• Conducting mentoring/coaching by experts or senior personnel with younger or newer personnel;
• Shadowing by younger/new/subordinate staff of experts and/or senior staff;
• Encouraging informal communication between experts and novices within an organization;
• Implementing a culture of working in teams inside the organization;
• Conducting self-assessment of each staff member’s achievements;
• Collaborating with communities of practice;
• Implementing on-line collaborations, in which research or projects are done through e-workgroups and for which procedures are available on-line;
• Using process mapping;
• Using laddering techniques.

Explicit knowledge

The capture of explicit knowledge, though a less challenging task, can be very laborious because of its enormity. Still, with advances in computer and Internet technologies, most, if not all the explicit knowledge can be captured in electronic formats. This can be in the form of ASCII text files, MS Word, MS PowerPoint, PDF, HTML, XML, scanned images, PSD, RTF, Comma Separated Values (CSV), etc. For image files, standards such as JPEG, GIF and TIFF are used. Video formats can be in raw format VOB or in MPEG, AVI, etc. Size and portability of video files are factors that should be considered when selecting which video format to use. The following methods and tools may be used individually or in combination to preserve explicit knowledge:

• Digitization of hard copies;
• Use of relational databases;
• Storage of photos and/or sound and/or video files in databases;
• Development of computer models and simulations;
• Creation of editable source files available to concerned personnel, such as wikis;
• Creation of 3-D models;
• Document management;
• Use of decision support systems as a tool, like data mining.

The capture of explicit knowledge should be followed by validation to ensure that correct and key knowledge resources are those which have been captured. Some validation techniques include inspection, peer review and checks against data constraints.

Source: Comparative Analysis of Methods and Tools for Nuclear Knowledge Preservation

Description 2

Alumni programme

Source: National approaches and strategies for Nuclear Knowledge Management

References

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Special consideration to be taken while capturing knowledge