Towards a comprehensive knowledge continuity management framework

Abstract

Employee departure, promotion, transfer, or retirement puts organizations at risk of losing critical knowledge. This loss can be mitigated through activities that identify critical knowledge and construct a plan for its transfer from incumbent employees to their successors. Consequently, organizations need to develop and implement a comprehensive knowledge continuity management (KCM) strategy.Although KCM frameworks exist, they are highly domain and context specific, being developed for a certain work environment. This makes them difficult to generalize to other environments. Moreover, they have divergent terminology, stages, and activities, making it challenging to establish practical guidelines and organizational strategies using more than one approach. The purpose of this study is to methodologically construct a comprehensive KCM framework built with stages and associated activities of well-established frameworks. This paper presents a summarized review of twelve theoretical frameworks from three related areas of research: human capital management, succession planning, and knowledge management (KCM, knowledge loss, knowledge retention). Commonalities in stages and activities are discussed, based on content, narrative, and thematic analyses. The findings point to five thematic similarities: 1) conducting a knowledge audit; 2) establishing the KCM objectives and scope, and assigning responsibilities; 3) planning the KCM implementation and conducting a pilot; 4) performing the knowledge transfer; and 5) integrating the KCM into the organizational culture and establishing support programs. These themes constitute the basis of sequencing stages and assigning corresponding activities in a proposed KCM framework.