Article
Prevent loss of knowledge
A general issue in many organizations today is that data silos occur when information is not shared sufficiently across departments and even between people within a department. This happens for a number of reasons and can be difficult to combat without the right technical solution.
Relying on knowledge sharing as a practice between members of your organization makes your organization vulnerable in several ways.
First of all, establishing a culture of knowledge sharing is much easier said than done, and certainly does not happen overnight.
Second, most members of your organization are likely busy with pressing tasks, and may not be able to prioritize the time to share knowledge in their daily work.
Third, a person may leave your organization unexpectedly and take with them any information that has not been centralized.
Having access to all relevant data and information is essential to reaching the full potential of each member of your organization as well as your organization as a whole.
What happens when different departments do not share knowledge?
If a maintenance team discovers a leak in their network, they will most likely instantly allocate resources to fixing the leak. But what if the planning department was already planning to renew that part of the network in the coming months? In that case, the maintenance team’s resources are better utilised by focusing on other pressing tasks, but they will only know to do that if the right information is shared between the two units.
Solution: Increase transparency with centralized data storage
The only way to prevent losing valuable information is to make sure that it is stored in a centralized system.
For instance, you want to make sure that all data collected from your water or wastewater network is compatible and available to anyone in your organization whose work may benefit from it. Making sure that all departments have access to the same data will ease collaboration and their mutual understanding.
Second, you want to make sure that knowledge is not limited to certain people. The more you are able to customize your platform for data storing, the more information it can contain. For instance, a simple monitoring solution may be able to send you standard alarms if pressure in your network drops below a certain value, but with a more advanced solution, you may be able to set up intelligent alarms that will only be triggered if pressure drops below a customized value, based on historic data from your system. That way, you are not relying on the experience of people in your organization to know whether an alarm is critical, and the people who would usually handle these alarms can prioritize their time on more value-creating tasks.
All in all, increasing transparency will benefit all members of your organization individually and collectively.