When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, teams and organizations across every sector of industry were forced to re-examine their work practices and routines, especially with regard to sharing information. Those organizations that maintained productivity and collaborated efficiently before the pandemic continued to do so, despite the disruption the pandemic created.
But other organizations, including federal agencies, didn’t fare as well, and two years later, some continue to fall behind. What can be done to improve productivity and combat ineffective collaboration post-pandemic? A good place to start is focusing on the importance of proactive curation.
What is proactive knowledge curation?
First, curation in general is the process of selecting, organizing and looking after items in a collection.
The most recognizable example of curation is in a museum. Museum curators manage huge collections of art and artifacts and display them in ways the public can appreciate and enjoy.
Similarly, data and knowledge curation is how an agency or organization captures, distributes, and effectively uses information.
Proactive curation simply means putting a judicious plan or strategy in place to accommodate this information and any new information that gets added. Keep in mind: technology is not strategy. Simply buying software won’t fix a team’s productivity or collaboration problems. This is why proactively curating and managing your knowledge and data become so important. It doesn’t happen automatically.
Why is proactive curation important?
Proactive Curation Primes the Pump
Nobody pays to visit an empty museum. And so people don’t want to visit a site that feels like one either.
Since knowledge is at the heart of every decision a federal agency makes, individuals or employees accessing the knowledge management platform to make those decisions need the most accurate and up to date information at their fingertips. But how quickly can someone make a decision when they have to scroll through mountains of data first?
Choosing reliable data and providing it in real-time is critical to mission success and a crucial step in proactive curation, ultimately resulting in a federal agency’s data strategy that drives smart decisions.
Proactive Curation Provides Value
Users of a knowledge management system are much more willing to contribute data when they receive something of value. Research shows that sharing knowledge leads to greater creativity, more innovation, and better performance. Instead of wasting precious time and energy searching for information, teams are free to put their energy toward problem-solving and improving productivity.
Pressuring people to share knowledge rather than making them see the value of it doesn’t work very well. Instead agencies can incentivize data collaboration, which can be as simple as making the datasets easy to load or as high-touch as working closely with a data provider to help them see the value, focusing on the shared intellectual capital collaboration generates.
Proactive Curation Brings Teams Together
Thomas Jefferson is famous for inviting political rivals over for dinner and engineering conversations that helped people discover their common humanity. Though proactive curation rarely serves a warm meal, it does have the capacity to break down barriers between groups that would otherwise not interact frequently.
When global phenomena, like a pandemic, forces people to work remotely, proactive curation makes it easier for teams to work together and build a general understanding of a given topic.
A federal agency’s data strategy might, then, include creating multiple channels across multiple countries and time zones to crowd-source knowledge, establishing processes that pair proficiency with best practices for easier collaboration, and choosing products that topple silos and maximize ROI.
Boost Productivity and Bring Teams Together with Tesla Government
Museums don’t curate themselves. Neither does data. During the pandemic many agencies learned this the hard way. But by partnering with data curation experts at Tesla Government, agencies can seize this opportunity to incorporate proactive curation into their data management strategies. Together we can find solutions to improve productivity, encourage collaboration, and bring teams together, setting federal agencies up for success, whatever the future holds.
We can help you come up with a proactive curation strategy.
See what we can do for you.