From my contacts with customers and talks with various organisations it very constant that collecting existing knowledge is a challenging task. To start with, knowledge frequently resides in senior employees’ mind. It doesn’t take long before they realize what is at stake. Getting their expertise and know-how requires to take into account several aspects:

• It must be easy to collect knowledge on the working place. Kneaver tray is precisely done for that. It is non intrusive, fast and allows everyone to take note of what comes in ones mind at once.
• Senior employees are also often low tech. They are ready to contribute but you can’t ask them to suddenly become editors. Audio recording and videos are a great substitutes to writing.
• Triggers: The motivation to enrich the system is often prompt by a call from a customer or a supplier, a question asked by a junior member of the team. Scan this paper, take a screen shot and just ask enough to remember what was the point.
• Be prepared to have some editing work behind. It can’t be the work of the management but a temporary hire versed in writing can be a good help. it’s a triple win strategy. increase the value of contributors, saves management effort and gives the makeshift editor a good opportunity to apply writing skills. However based on experience don’t count on junior members of the team. They have too much to learn, they are already too much involved in execution and they lack perspective.
• Keep track of who contributed, how often and the quality. Be prepared to reward in a way or another any contribution to keep the motivation high. Since this is out of past tasks attribution of employes the beginning will be slow. Falling short of ackowledging contribution will not encourage mor effort. Be also prepared to reward outstanding contibutors with an extra bonus or other incentives.
• Contributing requires to be extroverted. The fact that Kneaver allows contributions to remain private helps contributors to become accustomed to what they did and eventually make it visible. again it is important that he feeback be positive.
• Extracting knowledge, turn it into procedure cannot be a strategy aimed toward the team itself. Obviously have some know how confer some knowledge. The perspective of both losing this advantage and having it turned the other way round is not an attractive promise. Be reassuring about the ultimate, long term goal of the knowledge capture.