Bodies of Knowledge by Jolito Ortizo Padilla

Much of the world is broken up into different professions, each with its own body of knowledge. Historically, this knowledge has not been widely spread and is often jealously guarded, to such an extent that learning what you need to know takes years of study and substantial cost. The Project Management Institute started a modern trend in 1987 towards making knowledge explicit with a white paper entitled A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge.

The idea is simply to take a discipline and document what you know about it in a structured way that creates a useful reference, both as reminders for professionals and as a development resource for people learning more about the discipline.

You can take this idea further, building one or more bodies of knowledge in your workplace. This needs care as making knowledge explicit can lead to people working in the area becoming defensive as they fear their value is being eroded. However, there is huge imperative for organization to sustain knowledge where it may be lost when people leave or retire. Knowledge continuity  is a very important subset of business continuity , which all too often stops at IT disaster recovery and ignores the critical human dimension.

An early challenge is how to break the area down into manageble parts. A useful principle that can be used here is that of a taxonomy-a system of classification. An early example from 1735 was the biological taxonomy of Carl Linnaeus, who defined the system of species and genus. A process focus can be helpful in quality related areas, for example and a clothes manufacturer may break things down by design, sewing or storage.

One approach is to review and brainstorm all of the different things that you do, writing everything on Post-it-notes that can be then clustered into related categories and sub-categories. You can then start asking questions such as:
  - What do we know about this area?
  - Is the knowledge held diffusely or by one person?
  - Can we document it?

This will help you prioritize action to capture the key items.

Sometimes documents are a good way to go but there are other ways too, such as videoing people doing key tasks, from skilled manual activity to decision-making and social interaction. As a part of retirement or leaving activity you can also record people talking about what they did, particularly the significant events where thinhs went badly or well.

An important part of any body of knowledge is the keeper of that knowledge. A library without a librarian quickly falls into decay and so also will a body of knowledge that is not actively managed and promoted. If you want a living system of knowledge then you need to ensure that it continues to grow and add value into the future.

A body of knowledge is never complete. You can only write so much and new areas are always being discovered and developed. There may also be such a wide range of things it would take forever to write down, so you need to decide what is best to capture and then write it and store it in a way that is easy to find and use. For larger topics, you may just keep references to key journal papers and books that can be explored when there is a need in the given specialist area.