Creating a Federal IT Knowledge Management Playbook
Challenge: Across the federal government, the need to share and retain knowledge is vital to the consistent and timely operation of services. However, all too often, the knowledge held by employees, contractors, and systems is not widely shared, entrenching vendors and creating scenarios where employees are not continually improving processes. This is especially relevant as a majority of the federal workforce is at an age where they are closer to retirement than to the start of their careers.1 There is the great potential for decades of knowledge to “walk out the door” in the coming decades.
Vision: An information sharing culture that stops the bleeding of information and creates risk-free exits.
Mission: To embed knowledge management as part of the organizational culture by creating strategies and processes for integrating information capture, retention, and dissemination into the information technology (IT) and personnel lifecycles.
Goal: A non-agency-specific knowledge management playbook containing courses of action (“plays”), checklists of steps to take, questions to ask, resources, and use cases/examples.
Proposal: To develop a Federal IT Knowledge Management Playbook covering:
- Succession Planning: knowledge to retain for continued support of agencies’ missions;
- Continuity of Operations: knowledge needed to restore critical systems during a natural or unnatural disaster; and
- Internal Operational Efficiency: knowledge required to conduct daily IT operations
We assessed knowledge currently available at our respective agencies and how successfully it’s being used; as well as research on tool evaluation and methods to encourage user adoption. We also addressed knowledge monitoring and change control.
Impact and Results: Success is defined as meeting the adoption rate set by a senior executive based on the organizational goals related to the new knowledge management processes. Organizations would likely go through a significant change to help retain and spread knowledge.
Challenges and Risks:
- Use cases may be vastly different between agencies
- Agencies may have different needs and processes for adoption, including risk appetite for necessary changes
- Playbook focus must not be too broad/high-level or too specific to a particular agency
To learn more about the team and the program which inspired this playbook, check out the About page.