Notes from 54th International STC Conference
Minneapolis, Minnesota, May 13-16, 2007

What is Knowledge Harvesting?

Larry Todd Wilson

Wilson graduated with a degree in marketing research and found himself averse to a career in multi-variate market analysis and the like. He decided instead to learn about learning (learning sciences, instructional technology, training)... and then adapt that to the workplace.

Session Description: This session presented a proven methodology for rapidly converting expertise into knowledge assets that can dramatically improve corporate performance, competitiveness, and valuation. It explored the relationship between knowledge harvesting, knowledge retention, and knowledge management; why knowledge harvesting works and its value proposition; stages, tasks, challenges, and milestones of codifying expert's know-how; and the nature of expertise and how it translates into perceptible knowledge that can be captured.

• Ties to Corporate Knowledge Institute... see http://www.stc.communityzero.com/scki. A copy of the presentation is available here.
• See also http://www.knowledgeharvesting.org
• Presenter was guided by pre-conference online questions from and discussion with STC conference attendees
• How can someone with no subject matter expertise actually do a good job in supporting such a specialty area? This certainly applies to technical communicators.
• The nature of expertise.
   
• Larger and more integrated cognitive units (chunks): 7 plus/minus 2... Miller's Law on how much you can hold in short-term memory. Experts have more capacity.
• Automaticity... are experts born or made? Both... SME requires both innate ability and extensive training (education). Automaticity often blocks the SME's ability to communicate about his/her area of expertise, especially in terms comprehensible to a lay audience.
• Self-monitoring skills... reflection, metacognition. These are greater in experts than in novices or journeymen.
• Problem representation.


• Tacit – Implicit – Explicit knowledge. Language is the ultimate barrier between tacit and explicit. Tacit is impossible to verbalize. How low can you go? Language cannot reach tacit, but it can reach implicit (knowledge that has not been verbalized but can be transmitted via language).
• Types of knowledge and information.
   
• Contextual. Signals. "Knowing when to and why to."
• Declarative. Support information. "Knowing about."
• Procedural. Guidance. "Knowing how to."
• Social. Collaborative norms. "Knowing how to work together."


• Knowledge harvesting, retention and management... plus organizational information.
• Stages of knowledge harvesting
   
• Focus. How do you "zero in"? Factors are business goals and objectives, operating processes, and management and support processes. Focus requires a process framework, which is unique to each organization, but there are various generic paradigms. APQC Process Framework. ISO. Six Sigma. Must move from goals through issues to specific outcomes, within the process framework. Find the "go-to" people (the ones who are summoned to deal with crises).
• Find. Gather information. Determine what is known. Identify written sources of information. Identify human sources of information. While you do not become an SME, you must achieve an "apprentice" level of knowledgeability in order to tap the SME.
• Elicit. Determine what should be known. Perform a gap analysis. (Use contextual, declarative, procedural, and social channels.) Asking good questions efficiently closes the gap by drawing out deep insights from the SME. There are about 18 types of questioning techniques; interviewer must adjust to find the best technique for a particular SME. You can prepare questions in advance, but there is no single way to present them. Flexibility to adapt during the discussion is extremely important. Incentives: how to get the SME to talk? A full humility and a genuine sense of respect for the SME are important. An important part of that is assuring the SME that you will be coming back to him/her to validate your writing/editing to ensure its technical accuracy. This assuages a natural SME skepticism and can even cut through technical arrogance. You can also validate in real-time (e.g., "am I understanding this correctly?"), which not only improves accuracy but builds rapport. It's also important to have a natural curiosity and a passion for learning. Listen for the nouns and the verbs and connect them with the results.
• Organize. This stage typically takes 2 to 2.5 times the elicitation stage. Apply a content-, product-, tool-, or delivery-based scheme. Content scheme includes information typing information clustering, information chunking, and outlining. Use of a recorder lets you keep pace with the SME and focus on elicitation. You can then use the organizational phase to review the recording in depth and impose order via ones of the four basic schemes (or some combination thereof).
• Package. Self-directed, performance support, training session, online collaboration. Idea is division of labor into multiple media in delivering the message: "spread it around." Self-directed learning is well-suited to declarative knowledge. Performance support medium is "how" oriented (helping people do their jobs on a day-to-day basis) and is well oriented to procedural knowledge. Training sessions are well oriented to textual and social knowledge. Online collaboration is oriented toward social factors, which involve interpersonal skills (can't be packaged into a web site or a document). Organize content for presentation: create navigational tools (tables, indexing, linking) and format the content. Five basic functions to be considered in packaging are (1) learn, (2) accomplish the task, (3) document vital information, (4) evaluate patterns, and (5) adapt.
• Apply. Deploy deliverables. That is a major milestone, but it is not the final step.
• Evaluate. Thorough evaluation allows for subsequent adaptations and product improvement.
• Adapt. Continuous product improvement by increased knowledge harvesting, including customer feedback.


• "Balanced Scorecard," performance indicators, Six Sigma: there are many different systems of metrics to measure performance.
• Should you use a laptop in an interview? Generally not... it creates a physical barrier between you and the SME. A better alternative is a small recorder (with permission, of course), or perhaps having a third person in the room to capture data in real-time (again, with permission). Some SMEs respond well to seeing notes appear on a projection screen in real time; it inspires them to open up with more information. Others find it distracting. Here again, you have to be flexible in both your line of questioning and the tools you use, adapting to the SME rather than expecting that person to adapt to you.
• Signals are like symptoms; issues are like diagnoses.