The need to transfer knowledge differs based on the organization, industry, and retirement timelines. However, successful knowledge transfer is the need of the hour.
In most cases, videos are the most preferred way to manage, store & transfer knowledge.
Let us learn more about institutional knowledge management, how to capture the knowledge from retiring employees, the need for a knowledge-sharing platform & the best way to use them in this blog.
What is Institutional Knowledge?
Institutional knowledge refers to information that has been passed down from generation to generation within an organization. This type of knowledge is often considered to be very valuable because it helps organizations stay competitive.
Institutional knowledge is a term that Peter Drucker coined in his book The Effective Executive. He defined institutional knowledge as “the accumulated body of facts, principles, procedures, skills, and habits of mind that constitute the tacit knowledge of an institution or group.”
Institutional knowledge is shared knowledge. It’s important because it allows employees to solve problems and innovate new ideas. In addition, it will enable them to develop their skills and improve their performance.
Why Preserve Institutional Knowledge?
Institutional knowledge is the accumulated wisdom of experience gained over time from working within an organization.
In other words, collective knowledge comes from years of experience and learning. Institutional knowledge is often passed down through generations.
The older employees tend to pass their knowledge onto the younger ones. This helps them stay relevant and valuable to their employers.
To learn more about how KM works in different industries, we've compiled two different blogs for you:
Knowledge Management in Legal Department
Knowledge Management in Insurance Industry
What is a Knowledge Base?
The term was coined in the 1970s by IBM researchers who wanted to describe their new concept of storing data in a structured way.
Knowledge bases are valuable tools for managing and sharing information within organizations. They provide a main place for employees to store and share information.
A knowledge base (KB) is a website, portal, or platform where users can ask questions or post answers to common problems. It is often used to provide information about a specific topic. For example, a KB might contain a certain brand or product information.
Knowledge bases are becoming increasingly crucial for businesses. They allow customers to get their questions answered without contacting customer service. In addition, they also give companies a chance to show off their expertise.
What is a Knowledge Sharing Platform?
Knowledge sharing platforms (KSP) are websites, portals or any medium where people share their knowledge, ideas, and experiences. They are also known as knowledge communities or knowledge networks.
Which One Should You Choose to Manage Institutional Knowledge?
Knowledge Base or Knowledge Sharing Platform Both KBs and KSPs are valuable tools for businesses. They provide a great way to increase brand awareness, corporate communication, employee productivity, and trust.
Both can be used for institutional knowledge management. Knowledge bases (KB) and Knowledge Sharing Platforms (KSP) are two platforms that allow users to share information and preserve institutional knowledge.
They offer similar features such as creating groups, forums, blogs, etc. The main difference lies in their purpose. KBs are designed to store large amounts of data, whereas KSPs focus on user-generated content.
A knowledge base is a repository of information that contains articles, documents, or other pieces of content. It is usually created by experts who want to share their expertise with others.
For example, Wikipedia is a well-known knowledge base that allows anyone to contribute articles.
Learn more about Enterprise Knowledge Management
What is Institutional Knowledge Management?
Institutional Knowledge Management (IKM) is a relatively new concept within the field of knowledge management. IKM is defined as the systematic application of research findings from academic studies into organizational decision-making processes.
When to Use Videos in Institutional Knowledge Base?
Video has become a powerful tool for businesses looking to share information with their customers. But should you always use video in your knowledge base? Video is becoming a crucial part of customer service.
In fact, according to research, 60% of consumers are more likely to buy the product after consuming video content. The answer depends on whether you want to engage your audience. If you want to create a sense of urgency, video is a great way to convey important messages.
On the other hand, if you want to build trust and credibility, then the text is better suited.
What is Video Knowledge Management?
Video knowledge is overgrowing. People are creating more videos every year. These videos are being shared online and have become an integral part of our daily lives. We can access them easily, whether we watch them at home, school, or anywhere else.
Video knowledge management is a new concept that helps us manage these videos. It collects, organizes, and shares video knowledge across multiple platforms, allowing viewers to access information anytime.
Many large enterprise organizations are using video knowledge management to improve their internal communications, productivity & capture & preserve their institutional knowledge.
Learn more about Knowledge Management Examples
Benefits of Using Video in Institutional Knowledge Management
One of the primary use cases of centralized video knowledge management is the loss of knowledge any organization faces when an employee leaves. About 100,000 baby boomers are retiring from the workforce every day.
Organizations across all industries face the looming threat of losing invaluable institutional knowledge as their most experienced employees leave in droves.
Half of the organizations do not have formal workforce planning processes and tools to capture knowledge from their retiring employees.
25% of the organizations even admitted to letting their employees retire without knowledge transfer. Businesses cannot afford to ignore the urgency of knowledge management needs to capture and document the wealth of expertise from their outgoing employees.
Failure to document industrial expertise is highly likely to jeopardize business continuity and success due to the potentially massive scale of knowledge loss.
Preserving Industrial Knowledge From Your Retiring Experts Using Video
Lucky for modern-day organizations, there is a widely scalable, cost-effective, and engaging medium to capture, document and maintain institutional knowledge and expertise from retiring experts.
Your organization can use video for institutional knowledge management, utilize it for succession training, and preserve it for the years to come quickly and creatively.
Not only this, but a video is also one of the most popular and engaging learning mediums among millennials – the generation of digital natives replacing your retiring baby boomers.
Resolving Video Challenges in a Single Platform
Despite its wide-ranging benefits for scalability, cost-saving, time-efficient knowledge transfer, and engagement – video is not easy to manage. Video requires specialized expertise to stream, store, manage and distribute to a large workforce in a centralized, scalable, and cost-efficient solution.
Following are the challenges organizations can expect to encounter when they first start using video:
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The video takes up enormous storage space on your servers
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Video streaming uses up too much intranet bandwidth
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Video files come in many different formats
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Video must be optimized for playback on various devices
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Video encoding can be painfully slow
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Video sharing and distribution must be secure yet easy
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You cannot search inside video content (without the right technology)
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You cannot calculate video ROI or monitor user engagement without detailed video analytics
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Professional video production can be very costly
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And most importantly, your entire video investment goes in vain if your viewers cannot access the media smoothly, when and where they need it!
Considering this, it is best to leave video streaming to the experts. VIDIZMO, for instance, offers a complete video streaming solution for end-to-end video upload, streaming, storage, processing, search, and distribution.
With this, VIDIZMO resolves all video-related challenges in a single enterprise knowledge management platform deployed in your company’s cloud, on-premises or a hybrid model that leverages both.
Things You Need to Keep in Mind Before Opting for a Video Knowledge Management for Institutional Knowledge
Knowledge transfer needs differ based on the organization, industry, and retirement timelines. However, successful knowledge transfer must be backed by standard preparatory work before you start making the videos.
The following are some pointers to keep in mind:
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Determine the critical skills or expertise of each retiring employee to define what needs to be documented
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Identify retirement timelines for employees to prioritize recording schedules and timelines
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Select the optimal video presentation method – talking head video, screen capture, PowerPoint/ graphics supported video, field training video, demonstration, expert interviews, panel, etc.
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Prep the presenters with notes and presentation skills to ensure a smooth video recording experience
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Plan and allocate video recording slots for different employees to avoid scheduling conflicts.
*Most companies prefer to execute pre-production activities in-house, but if you need professional services, VIDIZMO can facilitate your company with pre-production planning or even end-to-end project management services.
If you're looking for a knowledge management system, We’d love to respond to your Knowledge Management RFP.
How to Use VIDIZMO Enterprise Video Platform for Institutional Knowledge Management
Once you have laid the preparatory groundwork, it is time to follow a few simple steps to capture, document and share your videos across the organization using the VIDIZMO enterprise video platform.
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Upload Captured Content:
Record and upload videos from any external camera/ recording device on your VIDIZMO.
Alternatively, users can also shoot video straight from their smartphones using the VIDIZMO web application and have it uploaded to your VIDIZMO video portal.
Once recorded, ingest, and upload the video to the VIDIZMO media library. With wide-ranging support for all video file formats, you can use any recording device and integrate with the encoder of your choice.
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Store and Archive:
Securely store all recorded videos in the VIDIZMO video library and retain the videos if needed. Avail infinitely scalable video storage in the cloud, on-premises, or hybrid cloud to support storing and archival large video files for long or short-term use.
With this, you can document and preserve the knowledge of all your retirees in a consolidated video library accessible to all or selected employees, depending on the need.
VIDIZMO also supports auto-archival of videos depending on a set expiration duration, which helps optimize storage.
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Organize and Manage:
Organize videos into categories to help your users search and locate the content in seconds. Create categories based on author or presenter name, content type, target audience, or any specific topic, subject or field that helps identify the video. You can also assign multiple tags to allow quicker search and navigation.
To compile videos with supporting digital assets such as images, presentations, and documents, you can create a collection to help manage, access and track all digital assets.
Your users can also create their own learning plans by adding all their choicest videos in a personal folder that they can follow to monitor completion and progress.
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Search Using Metadata or Spoken Words in Video:
Video content search is critical in utilizing the documented knowledge. Your efforts to document and preserve institutional knowledge and expertise are wasted if your employees cannot find what they need and when and where they need it.
With VIDIZMO’s powerful metadata search, your employees can instantly search for the right video using keywords, tags, metadata categories such as author, topic, title, description, etc. or any other custom metadata categories you would like to assign your videos.
We offer intelligent video search to help your users search inside the videos for spoken words, on-screen text, faces and objects - they can quickly jump to relevant portions of the video instead of watching the entire video again and again.
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Share, Assign and Track:
When it comes to succession training, it is crucial to share training content quickly and conveniently. Moreover, in the case of individual or group training, an outgoing employee should be able to assign their videos to any number of employees who might need to learn from them.
Not only this, but any assigned training video consumption can be monitored using detailed video analytics, tracking user engagement with precise details of who watched what, when, how much, and more.
Other than this, you can use the VIDIZMO video knowledge management platform to:
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Make the videos viewable on any device, including smartphones and tablets.
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Support all videos with automatically generated transcripts and closed captions.
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Assign various user roles and permissions to users, restricting who can create, moderate, edit, publish, view, or share content.
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Edit videos by trimming the beginning, middle, end, or clip longer videos into shorter, microlearning videos.
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Assign access to certain course playlists to required individuals only; include quizzes, polls, surveys and handouts in your video to make them more engaging, informative and interactive. Track completion and reward certificates to the ones who successfully completed.
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Send out reminders for employees to view any unwatched videos from their assigned videos.
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Conduct live video training sessions accessible to any number of employees across the organization.
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If your organization uses or would like to use video as a knowledge management tool to document expertise from your ageing or retiring workforce to preserve institutional knowledge, we can help!
VIDIZMO offers specialized video solutions for institutional knowledge management for other enterprise video use cases, such as corporate communication, sales and marketing, live events, and more.
To know how we can help solve your organization’s video challenges, contact us today or request our free 30-day trial to experience the platform.
