Capturing mechanism

This is a process that extracts something from the environment or from another process. One good example is the process of documentation.

Imagine a groups meeting. A participant in the meeting can be assigned the task to take notes (meeting notes), we call this harvesting. These notes can be taken using in a text processing application (a tool, could be a pen and a paper), which can be saved in a specific file format and stored in a database. Thus, the information harvested during the meeting can be made available to other participants after the meeting, and can be made accessible whenever. We call this process of extracting relevant information from a process (the meeting) and storing it to make it accessible at a later time by other people documentation, which is a "capturing mechanism".

Capturing mechanisms are part of accumulation mechanisms, building organizational knowledge and increasing the organization's ability to deal with complex problems and to innovate.