Many organizations in the hydro industry today are experiencing “brain drain” as their most proficient operations and maintenance staff retire. As these experienced staff leave, each organization faces a struggle to extract, preserve and utilize the expert knowledge gained by these employees over the years. This knowledge management challenge is especially true in operations management, where failure to do so could result not only in increased cost, but also have grave health, safety, and compliance implications. Specific challenges include: 1. Knowledge that is lost, especially when the most experienced of staff retire. 2. Information technology fragmentation due to storage limitations, incompatible formats, and various mediums. 3. Interfacing new technological tools that may or may not interface with older knowledge systems. 4. Differences in archetypes for digital document management between newly educated employees and those that are more mature. 5. Poorly developed training, knowledge transfer, or collaborative programs that encourage staff interaction and “download” of enterprise know-how. Capturing, collaborating, modifying, and keeping current enterprise operations management data such as Standard Operating Procedures (SOP’s) remain a key priority for executives and billions of dollars a year are spent on knowledge management initiatives. Knowledge management vendors are ubiquitous and are continuing to refine the tool sets to make it easier to incorporate workflows and, in turn, making enterprises more dependent upon them to execute job tasks. Beyond versioning, collaborative knowledge management tools foster the discussion among staff to discuss work processes and refine the captured knowledge over time, and, as a result, making content as current as is feasibly possible. Our presentation will concentrate on the challenges of effective knowledge management, the importance of retaining intellectual capital, and will provide a method to more easily capture, store, access, and refine operations management knowledge. We will focus on knowledge management best practices so that the audience will gain an understanding of the challenges and pitfalls of implementing a successful knowledge management program for operations management. Lastly, examples will be provided, where a commercial system (OMSConnect~(TM)) has been successfully deployed and applied in asset-intensive industries. We will explain the business need addressed and how each organization implemented the solution.
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