Knowledge - Capture, Keeping and Using It

I recently attended an interesting evening get together arranged by Awen Clement at a very trendy, if somewhat overheated, coffee shop in Birmingham which looked at "Knowledge." I'm certainly not in the "knowledge professional" league of the other attendees, but I have some particular interests in the field, as should everyone who works in engineering.

I'm currently talking to a couple of companies which have particular areas of core competency for which they are justly renowned. The first builds essential items of capital plant for a wide range of industries, and has become known as the "go to" people for particularly difficult applications. Whatever the circumstances the odds are they will have seen it, and done it, before. However, there's a growing realisation that this is not down to "the company" (founded in the 1950s) but "the people" - and while they've also a justly deserved reputation for being long term employers who have stuck by their workforce in thick or thin, there's no holding back the tide of time and there are key retirements looming. How can that knowledge be captured before the employees leave (or fall under a bus, for that matter) and how can a system be set up to capture how things are actually (as opposed to theoretically) done in the future? The second issue I won't touch on here, but the first was a topic for discussion over coffee. Firstly, it's a good sign that the company is now aware of the problem. I've worked at a firm with a similar situation, and their response was to call in consultants with tick-sheets and forms. It didn't work, and an entire business area was lost with the workers who left. A typical "engineering mindset" was the verdict of the experts at the coffee house. Their suggestion surprised me. Apparently studies have shown that narrative is the best way of capturing heavily nuanced "practical procedures", much as is taught for witness questioning in law enforcement. The recommendation was videoing of fairly free form narration, going over particular key contracts, but not attempting to guide the interviewees too much on the "first pass". If required the tapes could be transcribed (through outsourcing), which would then enable text searching. It's a novel idea, and one that I've put forward, but I can see there's still some convincing required. The other company may be even trickier; it has an expertise peripheral to its engineering - the shipping of items to areas which are difficult to ship to, usually due to awkward bureaucracies, difficult political situations and conflict. However, as the evening wore on, and the coffee went down, I began to wonder whether much of that capability was down to a few key people in their shipping department, and thought about suggesting someone bring a video camera to work...