By Jon Axworthy
Published in Raconteur
Let’s talk about fried chicken, in particular, the finger lickin’ variety coated in a blend of 11 herbs and spices. This may seem like a strange place to start an investigation into the convergence of AI and employee knowledge, but that famous recipe is a prime example of how documenting corporate knowledge can ensure continued business success.
After all, if the company’s famous founder hadn’t had the presence of mind to write down his original recipe on the sheet of notebook paper now locked away in a corporate safe in Louisville, who knows how the American company’s commercial history would have been rewritten, or if they would have had a history at all.
Every company has their own original recipe, their secret formulas and corporate secrets. In reality they have thousands of them, but rather than being locked away for perpetuity on paper, they are held in the minds and habits of employees, and this can be a significant limiter of growth.
“The existence of this tribal knowledge also poses a significant risk, particularly as the rate of change increases exponentially,” says Charles Araujo, an independent digital analyst and founder of the Institute for Digital Transformation. “As organisations are forced to change course rapidly, these bits of undocumented, yet critical, information become a minefield of known unknowns that can threaten their ability to adapt.”