I’ve always had an interest in knowledge management and how tacit knowledge in particular can be captured within an organisation. I once read about a management consultancy that use a specially constructed database to store information about the different industries and past projects the consultants have worked so that less experienced consultants can access the knowledge of the senior staff when dealing with situations unfamiliar to them. The value in a management consultancy is in the experience (and therefore knowledge) of its consultants so the database they use is an incredibly valuable resource that forms an integral part of the offering to clients. It occurred to me that a database like this is pretty valuable to any type of knowledge worker, in my case I.T., so recently I set about implementing a personal level version of the management consultancy knowledge database.
An Inconvenient Mess: Al Gore’s office space and his unique system of knowledge management
Martin Minnock 