Knowledge Management during COVID-19

During this time of social distancing, quarantine, and working from home. A simple question must be asked. Was your company or business ready to do work outside of the business space? Or did you have to rush to find possible ways to have your workforce able to work from home? Did you have to layoff or fire employees just because your company could not adjust to these times?

There will be some businesses no matter how well they plan for something like this they will have to close up shop (at least temporarily) due to not being an emergency essential type of business. So the next question is what can you do during this time?

One of the many activities I have been doing is some Personal Knowledge Management in terms of how I organize and maintain information on my home system (the same can be done with your organization artifacts as well). I call it my digital spring cleaning. This is where I take a hard look at the artifacts, images, documents, etc. to see what is stuff that I have collected over the past few years. Of course, I retired from the military in February 2019 and I still have pay stubs from 2000 and certificates from 1998.

Some of the information I will keep and put in an archived state (pay stubs, official awards, and recognitions, tax records) and other stuff (bill statements, irrelevant articles, random pdf’s from places I have visited) will be disposed. Other artifacts I will transform what their current media (Word documents, Excel sheets, PowerPoints (if I had a dime for every PowerPoint I made in the military I could retire a very comfortable lifestyle)) and change them to pdf’s or in some cases in custom lists in SharePoint in order to me to track trends on particular information.

One of the other things I have been doing on my own information is developing a naming convention that I can stick with so that I can pile and metatag my artifacts without building out folders in my portal site.

If you have any questions on how to do this on your local portal, page or even hard drive please feel free to contact me at cannonco@cannonco.net

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