Your company, your business is valuable and that value is made up of many things, its the people who work there, the systems you work with, principles you adhere to and the services you provide to your customers and clients. Underlying all of this is the knowledge and expertise that’s contained within those people systems and services, losing any of these can be a critical blow. 

 

Ask yourself these questions: 

 

• What would be the impact of losing a key member of staff?

• How easy would it be to recover from the loss of critical systems? 

• What steps can I take to reduce the risks and impact of those events? 

 

Losing Staff

We have to consider that no matter how enjoyable a business is to work for at some point we run the risk of losing staff, whether, to sickness, retirement, or other opportunities. With some studies outlining that it costs 150-200% of a replacements annual pay to bring in new staff (due to training, recruitment and loss productivity), anything we can do to reduce the impact of that transition is helpful. 

 

Empowering new members of staff to be as effective as possible from day one will significantly reduce the impact on your organisation when somebody leaves.  Improving your approaches to capturing and transferring the knowledge you hold with smooth the path and will ensure you can continue to operate in the event of personnel changes. 

 

Security of Critical Systems

If you are improving the knowledge that you capture and retain, then you need to take some steps towards ensuring that this information is secure while remaining accessible. 

Understanding and implementing the principles of Information security is critical first step.  

 

The first goal of information security is to ensure that systems are predictably dependable in the face of a developing range of threats. Activity around this should not be confined to systems or information in an electronic formats. It applies to all aspects of safeguarding information or data, including working practices and physical security.

 

You can take positive steps by having a progressive framework that supports your organisation to maintain, monitor and continually improve your security practices and by extension protect information systems and their contents. 

 

What steps can you take? 

Take time to understand the knowledge held by your employees, work with them to get a clear picture. Its likely that they have working practices and knowledge of shortcuts, and operational quirks you are not aware of. 

 

Put in place a mechanisms and tools for capturing and maintaining essential knowledge so that it can be easily accessed and transferred to new members of staff. 

 

Look in depth at your Information security procedures, where is your information held, what are your passwords like, how aware are your staff of potential risks such as phishing attacks  etc. 

 

What can we do? 

We have spent many years working with organisations helping them to collaborate and capture information. During this time we have developed tools and techniques that support you in first mapping the details of your knowledge silos, and then devise tools to capture and maintain that information effectively. 

 

With our understanding of ISO 27001 we can support you on a journey in outlining where you want to go with your information security. We provide a range of services from working with you to develop a specification for your security aims to providing regular audits to help to monitor your progress towards your goals. 

 

If you are interested in knowing more about how we can help you maintain and secure the essential knowledge within your organisation drop us a line.