Knowledge retention and sharing for Thales Group

Abstract

This report provides a detailed investigation and outcome of the research done by Team Thales on “knowledge retention”. The Thales Group has asked to examine the process of capturing valuable knowledge from their employees and provide a way to share it within the company's network of employees. In order to do this, the project team brainstormed and conducted individual studies to have a better understanding of the problem and its root cause. Moreover, an interim solution was first derived, and after series of meeting sections took place with the project tutor and the representatives from the Thales Group, the team was able to come up with a final solution. A competitor analysis was made to analyse existing solutions and identify their strengths and weaknesses in comparison to the solution the team arrived at. The interim solution is a mind map that serves as a blueprint and guide on issues the team had to pay attention to when considering a solution to the problem. The team identified six areas of interest: Business Critical, Communication, Environment, Risk Management, Security and Sharing. The final solution tackles the problem of knowledge acquisition and sharing through a structural and a technological approach, with special attention to user friendliness and adaptability so as not to increase the burden of the employees in form of additional workload. The structural solution includes a gap period while the technological solution is a tool called "Thales Knowledge Acquisition and Sharing Software" (TKASS). TKASS is a powerful software with a sense of inclusion and all-age group adaptation. It provides features like a secured file sharing tool called "THASTO", User Profile, the Knowledge Community where employees can ask questions and share “lessons learnt” and finally an intelligent wiki, which is smart enough to gather relevant connections and learns to help employees compose a well-detailed report. More about the problem, the studies done and how the team arrived at a final solution are discussed further in the later sections of this report.