Each transcript served one project and then served nobody
A research and knowledge function at a professional services firm was commissioning healthcare expert conversations at a steady rate. Each one was bought to answer a single project’s question, written up the way that project needed, and filed under that project’s name. Months later, a colleague with a neighbouring question had no way of knowing the conversation had ever happened.
So the firm kept paying for understanding it already had, and had no way of noticing. The filing system usually gets the blame, and the cause sits earlier than that. Material captured without a shared structure cannot be organized into one afterwards, however good the system it lands in. The same kinds of people come up again and again, which is what makes a shared record worth keeping.
We put the structure at capture rather than filing
We worked alongside the function across a coverage period. Every call ran to a shared spine of four things: the sector, the kind of role the person held, the topic, and the type of question asked. The project’s own questions still ran freely on top, so each call served its brief and joined the record too.
The spine was kept deliberately light. A heavy classification imposed on live work gets abandoned in the first busy week, and an abandoned structure is worse than none. Screening criteria and role definitions were recorded next to every conversation, and permission to reuse the material inside the firm was agreed at commissioning rather than chased afterwards. Everything reached Nextyn IQ, so the record was searchable while it was still being built.
The function began answering questions from the record alone
The function started answering questions out of the record itself, without commissioning anything new, because the work behind the answer had already been done. The reuse permissions turned out to matter more than anyone expected. A conversation that cannot be shared inside the firm is one project’s asset; one that can be is the firm’s.
The standing of the function changed with it. A knowledge team inside a firm is judged on what it can produce when someone asks, and this one could produce a view of the healthcare sector rather than a list of documents.
