Identification of key knowledge

An essential step in knowledge management is the identification of your organisation's key knowledge through mapping.

The identification of the knowledge held by your staff, necessary and essential to the performance of your business, is therefore a preamble to the evaluation (the evaluation criteria are established with the project team) and then to the analysis of its criticality.

The criticality of a piece of knowledge can be understood as the level of risk that a company takes in the event of a partial or total absence of control of this knowledge within the company. In other words, it consists of evaluating the potential impact of the loss of expertise in a business area of your organisation.

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Evaluation of the criteria

To do this, two types of criteria are assessed:

Vulnerability criteria (probability of occurrence of the loss of expertise linked to its availability, complexity, transmissibility, etc.),
Relevance criteria (which are simply a reflection of the degree of importance that the loss of knowledge has for a company in relation to established strategic objectives or axes).

Analysing the criticality of knowledge therefore amounts to determining and then ranking the probability of the loss of knowledge (vulnerability) in relation to the "degree" of importance that this loss would have for the company (relevance).

The ultimate aim of this analysis is to determine an action plan to safeguard your knowledge and know-how assets.

A four-step process

We propose a four-step approach to analyse the criticality of your business knowledge:

The first step is used to define the strategic objectives and the scope of the analysis as well as the resources required;
The second stage, which is essential, serves to identify the knowledge in the scope with your business teams;
The third step is to define the analysis grid with the choice of the most relevant relevance and vulnerability criteria;
Finally, the last stage is devoted to the evaluation and analysis of criticality, carried out at a given time, and aims to highlight the critical nature of the knowledge through thematic workshops with your experts in order to identify areas for improvement and the actions to be taken to define an action plan with the project team.

Criticality analysis in knowledge management

Identification of key knowledge

Evaluation of the criteria

A four-step process

ARDANS