What’s the point of capturing organizational knowledge if it’s going to be tossed into some file and forgotten? That’s all too often what happens to lessons from postmortems and after-action reviews. One way to make sure such knowledge will benefit the people who need it is to engage them in what we call a knowledge harvest: a systematic, facilitated gathering and circulation of knowledge. Our approach—piloted by Intel Solution Services (ISS), Intel’s IT consulting arm—has helped the company speed collection and transmission, and has improved the likelihood that knowledge gets productively and creatively reused.

The key is to identify, before the harvest begins, others in the organization who could use the knowledge (the “knowledge seekers”) and involve them in gathering valuable lessons. Consider how an ISS health-care-consulting team in Germany conducted a harvest. It viewed knowledge reuse as critical to the success of the company’s Future Hospital program, involving 160 subprojects that the team participated in. For one of those projects, it had developed an innovative medical dashboard that graphically displayed emergency room activities by aggregating transmissions from Wi-Fi tags on rooms, equipment and patients. Encouraged by initial successes in the ER, Oliver Mark—principal enterprise architect at Intel Germany and chief architect for this program—brought in Katrina Pugh as a harvest facilitator to help the team surface tacit knowledge and transfer it to the larger program.

As facilitator, Pugh recruited knowledge seekers from other departments and project teams at Intel. Because seekers are self-interested, they ask tough, exploratory questions of knowledge originators, extracting important nuances—not only about how a project was executed but also about how costs built up, how knowledge might be applied elsewhere, what worked and what didn’t and so on.

From the outset, the ISS team thought that Intel’s marketing department and solution delivery department (which develops consulting methods) might be able to apply what it had learned to creating and promoting future products. In a series of teleconferences, the team members—probed by the facilitator and the knowledge seekers—recounted how they had designed, adapted and deployed the technology and worked with new third-party software vendors. The harvest surfaced important Wi-Fi innovations that were developed by the Intel Germany engineers; it allowed seekers from solution delivery to explore how ISS structured its work with clients to reach consensus early and speed project delivery; and it helped the marketing department examine the potential for comarketing between ISS and the software vendor.

To circulate harvested knowledge, the facilitator conducted follow-up interviews with knowledge seekers, published summaries with links to source documents on the ISS home page and distributed these to selected people throughout ISS. Meanwhile, marketing developed and disseminated a case study for the medical dashboard and solution delivery circulated the medical dashboard architecture, implementation strategy and collaboration methods. These innovations took root immediately in other parts of the program and in Intel Solution Services’ US offices. Having seen the success of its first harvest, the German ISS team was eager to hold a variety of subsequent harvests that resulted in methodology improvements in health-care-consulting products, data-center design and project and operations staffing. 

Katrina Pugh is vice president for knowledge management at Fidelity Investments in Marlborough, Massachusets. Nancy M. Dixon is a principal at Common Knowledge Associates, based in Dallas.

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