Computing Canada provides coverage of a roundtable discussion on strategic industry developments of 2003 in: Taking The Industry's Pulse.
A member of this 'roundtable' is one Robert Garigue, chief information security officer, Bank of Montreal. Deep into discussing the answer to a 'Computing Canada' question on "Ensuring a healthy return on technology investments" while substantiating "the ongoing nature of the security spend," Garigue offers:
"You realize you have lots of people, but a couple of them are critical single points of knowledge. That's not good enough anymore. You have to have that knowledge available; it has to be institutionalized, and it can't be just in one individual; it has to be in the team. How do you identify single points of knowledge? When was the last time an audit was done around individuals who are single points of knowledge? We've done that review; we found 47 people that have single points of knowledge and we're putting in place a whole management structure to make sure we're addressing that as part of the HR process, not as part of the security or business continuity process."
Single points of knowledge? Or single points of failure? Or both? Have you taken the 'pulse' of your institutional memory lately?
K-Collector Topics: Knowledge Management Knowledge Organisation knowledge work Security VancouverSingle points of knowledge? Maybe he means key knowledge resources? IMHO you can't have a *single point* of knowledge -- that is like the apple without the apple tree and all of the other apples on all of the other branches, both near by and far.
Maybe they did something like this? Build a map of key knowledge resources and then do an HR plan around the results?
-- http://www.orgnet.com/experts.html
i actually wondered whether they had used inFlow for this exercise Valdis? 'single points of knowledge' is certainly an odd languaging of this problem set... my interpretation was that he combined the security concept of 'single point of failure' with that of 'key knowledge resources' and saw these key resources as 'single points of knowledge'...
Posted by: judith at January 20, 2004 02:07 PM