Programmer’s Mind
As we speak, the summer of great IT exodus is in progress.
Attrition is happening across various layers and hierarchies. It’s a race against time before LWD (last working day) approaches. More critical the role; greater is the need to capture the knowledge and absorb it before the candidate leaves the organisation.
Knowledge transfer plays a vital part in this transition process. Usually knowledge transfer (KT) consists of well known format of series of meetings (online zoom/teams meeting) with recording on. Where based on the topics/subjects the departing candidate explains and walks through various work related points and activities. He/She then provides some artefacts like word, ppt, excel etc to his/her successor.
Critical element in this KT journey is the knowledge/insight which the candidate painstakingly acquired after shedding lots of blood/sweat and burning countless mid night oil . To capture this knowledge/insight and package in an easy to digest format for transfer it to new employee is a real challenge.
But the nature of the knowledge is such that it is real hard to capture in some tangible form in its full totality. It is easier to capture raw data and information in these artefacts. But knowledge is more than that. It is the connected lines among various dots. That line usually exists in the mental landscape of the person. It is highly conceptual and needs significant amount of data points to grasp the concept in entirety.
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Various attempts have been made to capture this elusive part of Knowledge dimension. One such worth mentioning format is Knowledge graph. It is highly intuitive and represents information in relevant contextual manner.
Contextual story telling is very powerful tool of Knowledge/insight sharing. Human mind responds in a favourable way for such approach which stimulates intriguing way of knowledge discovery and fact finding.
Finally, it is an organisation’s duty and responsibility to encourage employee to diligently put extra effort to capture the anecdotes related to various business/technology domain where the employee has worked on during his/her tenure. It is more of a creative approach to explore various topics related to his roles and responsibilities journey.
Let’s imagine a world in not so distant future when Elon Musk’s Neural Link comes up with a novel technique where a device they have invented actually generates stories related to the employee wisdom and insights. It is capable of packaging this into various artefact files before the employee leaves the organisation. It could be holy grail for any knowledge based industry. On the other hand let’s see this development and it’s ramification from another perspective where a large IT organisation finally realises their long cherished dream of making every human resource completely disposable. All they need is this cool technology from Neural Link to commoditise Knowledge/Insight of the individual. Any skilled employee with invaluable knowledge/insight of the system will be subject of interest. Organisation would be keen to generate back up copies of knowledge artefacts first and quickly make it available to other prospective employees in order to make the experienced person not so vital for the business continuity; which in turn raise a question of pay hike for niche skills and over all ROI etc.
Quite frightening proposition isn’t it. Be careful what you wish for..
