Harnessing Crowd Sourcing for the Industrial Knowledge System

With the transformation of the workforce from the " baby boomers " to Gen Y, we see the rise of the team concept and the execution of activities over multiple skills and expertise. As the duration of people in a role or location reduces( with the norm expected to be 2 years of less), the importance of knowledge systems is going up. Companies are putting formal positions in place for knowledge management, to capture knowledge on how the plants are set up, operated and of situations. This role will be come the center of a movement to convert: ”Data to Information to Wisdom”.

The issue is the data/ knowledge today is in different forms, locations and is often “stranded”.

The real thought leadership relative to knowledge is coming from companies who are looking to “crowd sourcing” to harness the capture of experience. This is not as much about the capturing system, but the real is the transformation of culture to “crowd sourcing” contribution from the operational community of the company.

Speaking with one company last week they are putting a knowledge (wiki like) system combining this with two key adoption initiatives:

·         Make it simple to contribute no matter where people are on the job, and home to extend that it accepts multiple sources easily, and if someone works in MS Word, or Outlook they contribute and send an email that comes a posting etc. This I have seen work in the past when I was sailing you need to do a blog in a disconnected mode, so I would capture my thoughts in an email with the subject line as the title, and when I connected I would send email to an address that added it to the system. The knowledge leader last week stated he wanted to leverage the flying time, train time of his knowledge community.

·         Next was an incentive program for valued contributions and best contributions.

He recognized the short period left like the next 3 to 5 years to capture much of knowledge, but he was looking at plans to offer extensions for retiring workers to continue to contribute and be rewarded while also interacting with the active plant workers.

Now capturing is key but so is shifting this to effective “wisdom” that can easily be searched and under stood. Using tools to understand patterns, as well tag these data lakes. Capturing knowledge / experience on wiring, process behavior, to best practices to conditions, to actions. Another key discussion point was a dedicated management team like Wikipedia does that reviews, tags all contributions so the knowledge is effective. This also means deleting out of date data, reviewing common areas of searching, and holes in the knowledge map. This is not a part time job, it is a whole program if it is to be effective.

The final part of the puzzle is making this knowledge easily available and culture to leverage the knowledge. Initial trials this works easily for the Gen Y as they expect to search and understand, learning on the fly. Again the key is the ease of access from day to day tools the users are using.

Too often documentation and knowledge are after thoughts, it is good to see this transforming, even if it is just in the early adopters. This will be a growing transformation to leverage capturing such as Youtubes, wiki, and sketching tools.