Clearly, there is a demand for knowledge harvesting. However, in order to successfully harvest knowledge, an organization must go much further than just making technological changes. On the contrary, successful knowledge harvesting is largely based upon organizational adjustments; technological changes simply support these organizational activities (Laudon and Laudon, 446). The good news is that most successful knowledge harvesting plans use very similar organizational activities, allowing us to extract a general organizational plan to successfully harvest knowledge (Eisenhart, 52; Chua, 252). Knowledge Harvesting Inc.’s process for knowledge harvesting does a good job of capturing the processes used by most successful knowledge harvesting implementations. According to Knowledge Harvesting Inc., harvesting requires the following organizational activities: focus – deciding upon the knowledge that needs to be sought out; find and elicit – identifying the experts and interviewing them; and organize – categorizing, expanding, and pruning the results in an appropriate manner (Eisenhart, 52).
To illustrate an implementation of this harvesting process, we will examine how the Army’s Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) harvests knowledge. Even though CALL does not consciously use Knowledge Harvesting Inc.’s process for harvesting, we will notice how CALL still distinctly adheres to the same organizational procedures outlined by Knowledge Harvesting Inc.
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