The most important source has no connector
A large part of what your company knows about its products is written down nowhere. It sits in the heads of a handful of people. The product specialist everyone calls when they really need to know the details.
The story of Yves
We knew a large firm that produced industrial generator sets. Technicians, sales, anyone who wanted to know something in detail about a machine called Yves. Yves had been around there for twenty years. He had personally tinkered with every machine and knew everything about every unit. Which variant was prone to which defect, why a particular customer got a modified configuration, which combination you were better off avoiding.
That knowledge was in no system at all. It was in the head of Yves. And the day Yves retires, it disappears, unless you capture it in time.
How we draw out that knowledge
For exactly that black box we have developed an interview method. We draw the knowledge out in a structured way, without the specialist spending days on it.
The approach runs in three steps:
- Structured conversations. We interview your senior specialists with a method aimed at surfacing implicit knowledge: the things they take for granted, but that are written down nowhere.
- Captured and validated. The notes are turned into clear knowledge items and then reviewed and approved by the specialist. What goes in is correct.
- Always available. From then on the AI uses what was in their head, even when they are not in the room themselves. The knowledge stays, even if the person leaves.
From person-dependent to organisational knowledge
That way the knowledge of your best people is no longer a risk, but a lasting asset. No longer dependent on who picks up the phone that day, but available to your entire team, with source references.