Recently the government has experienced a massive wave of resignation of prominent and experienced expertise in many field of knowledge to private institutions. This large picture is found in government where many top prominent government brass executives are set to join private sector taking years of knowledge with them. The sad part is what happens when you lose somebody with such an immense valuable knowledge that can help the organization sustain itself. Although it's hard to stop people from migrating for greener pastures, the issue here is, how can we ensure that the best personal pass on their best knowledge to the next generation of executive. Other initiatives such as developing business process re-engineering, decision making frame works and use of expertise locators to track the flow of information are currently been used to attempt to curb the problems but still the situation remains unchanged especially in the quality of information.
The starting point is to ask the basic question, are we paying enough attention to the rate we are losing valuable skills and expertise in various fields as personnel continue shifting their jobs. Instead the emphasis must be put on how every organization must put up or build up a knowledge retention program to capture and retain knowledge on a continual basis, not just six weeks before the employee leaves the job. Changing corporate culture and business needs are now preaching contemporary concepts such as corporate strategic planning, corporate governance and management, competitive intelligence, thinking outside the box, identifying opportunities for cost-effectiveness. Many new employees are lost in the space after joining the organization when they actual found that literary there is nothing done in the past years that can be used to measure against the current challenges because people went away with that valuable experience and knowledge. Data mining and data discovery can be a nightmare to many organizations that fail to exploit quality information from heterogeneous sources such as texts videos, and audio sources.
That calls for the ability to have skillful intelligent information agents who are strategically well positioned within the organization and are able to select, digest, and filter assimilate and evaluate information. By assimilating data and information from a range of sources and in a range of formats to maximize intellectual capital can bring many spin over at an operational level. Knowledge harvesting as is commonly known is now becoming a must in every organization.
What kind of intelligent agents do we need?
Human Intelligence is derived from many sources, which include structured data in the form of books, web pages, or CD-Room, and unstructured sources from videos, films, music, teachers, parents and all kinds of personal interaction. The answer is to apply knowledge management agents who are competent enough to use knowledge management techniques with IT skills to succession planning, by maintaining and conveying that critical knowledge. One of the challenges facing many organizations is that in many cases business questions are not answered since their data sources are not found easily since they are not properly managed. We are from time to time bombarded with vast majority of information majority of which is not important. They must be fully conversant with the state of the art technology to be able to use to access, process, manipulate, manage and distribute the business information forming the centre of the core business.
