Assessing Knowledge Loss Risk with Departing Personnel

Knowledge workers hold much of an organization's knowledge. Unfortunately, these knowledge workers tend to be transient, and when they leave, they take the knowledge inside them. Organizations need to try to capture this knowledge but find it difficult as it is usually too late to capture this knowledge when a worker announces he/she is leaving. This chapter presents a process for assessing each worker for the risk of taking knowledge with them. The purpose of this process is to aid organizations in allocating resources to capturing the most valuable and most accessible of the knowledge potentially being lost in time for it to be captured and retained.