If the average age of the scientists in your company’s R&D department is 48, surely there is no need to worry yet about losing expertise if one of them retires? Wrong, says David DeLong: ‘I want to know which of the key people are 56, 58 or 60 3 who is getting ready to walk out the door.’ Mr DeLong, a research fellow at MIT’s AgeLab, is one of several experts urging organisations to work harder at ensuring that the knowledge held only in employees’ heads is not lost when they leave the company or retire. Judging by Accenture’s (2005) global study nearly four in 10 respondents said their organisations did not have a formal process and/or tools for capturing their workplace knowledge. 27 per cent said they expected to retire without any transfer of knowledge and only 17 per cent expected an intensive, months-long process of knowledge transfer. Northrop Grumman is very similar to many other aerospace companies, as a large proportion of its workforce are baby-boomers. Mr Cheese of Northrop Grumman says the technology has not been flexible enough to support the very real challenges of KM [knowledge management], and companies have often focused on technologies that act like libraries 3 giving a structure and taxonomy to corporate information 3 when KM is really about tacit knowledge retained by individual employees. This ‘social context of knowledge’ is often overlooked, says Eric Lesser, an expert in human capital issues at IBM Business Consulting Services. ‘Performance in highly competitive marketplaces requires workers armed with knowledge that goes beyond the explicit information contained in manuals and databases. There is an increasing need to tap into the experience, intuition and social networks of employees’, says Mr Lesser. ‘Technology can enable and help, but if a company does not have a culture of knowledge sharing and collaboration, all the technology in the world isn’t going to help’, he says. ‘Managers as a whole have not been educated to see intellectual property as an asset in the way that money is’, agrees John Kay, a member of the management group at PA Consulting Group. ‘If the average company managed its money in the way it managed its IP, it wouldn’t be in business.’ There is, finally, the question of who takes responsibility for implementing KM within organisations. Some companies have appointed, at boardroom level, knowledge managers who can influence the direction of the company, says Mr Kay, but others in the role have been glorified IT managers, who can organise the information but cannot influence the cultural aspects of KM. Experts such as Mr Kay and Mr DeLong point to several instances of companies that have recognised the need for effective KM. BP wins praise on the technology side for its expert locator system that helps employees find the right specialist within the company on a given issue, such as a particular type of oil drilling problem. The UK oil major is also commended on the touchy-feely front for making it part of a specialist’s job to help a successor, rather than simply getting on with his or her new job. Mr Kay contrasts that approach with the attitude in some parts of the UK civil service, where ‘people are deemed to be the expert in a field at the instant they step into it’. Mr DeLong cites the in-depth interviews carried out by Rolls-Royce, the UK aero-engine group, on soon-to-retire Concorde engine designers, to ensure their expertise was preserved for future customers 3 irrespective of Concorde’s own retirement. But getting experts to articulate their knowledge is no simple process, he warns, noting how one US organisation spent $1m on videotaping retiring experts but did not think about how future users would access the information they needed. The tapes now sit on a shelf, unused. IBM has been active in the KM field, too, both on its own account and on behalf of its customers. Internally, its ThinkPlace intranet tool, devised by Nick Donofrio, executive vice-president for innovation and technology, helps the company to marshal and share innovation, and is combined with several cultural and management approaches, including incentive and recognition schemes.
what is euphemistically termed ‘knowledge recovery’. In plain English, this means bringing back people whose knowledge has been lost, as contractors and consultants. One US study found that 60 per cent of organisations have been doing this, says Mr DeLong, not that companies are too keen to talk about it 3 ‘nobody wants to advertise that they’ve made a mistake’, he says. Mr Kay at PA says he is often called in by companies that have lost knowledge or are about to do so, and says this shows they have failed to build KM into their cultures. Another idea, recommended by Mr Kay, is a ‘friendly-leaver’ policy for early retirees, ensuring that successors are fully briefed, and he advocates creating a culture in which older people feel it is an important part of their job to bring on a new generation. This could be encouraged through financial incentives or simply, in a professional context, by the feeling of enrichment at having helped a younger colleague. Perhaps the biggest challenge, especially for big companies with a long history of downsizing, job cuts and corporate upheaval, is to develop or rebuild the trust that encourages employees to share knowledge rather than hoard it. ‘People will share with their colleagues if it is presented as helping colleagues with their career and keeping their own legacy alive in the company’, says Mr Shaffar. ‘As people get closer to retirement, and are presented with an opportunity to be a mentor to a new hire, I think we find they are pretty available.’
QUESTIONS
1. What types of knowledge are discussed in this case?
2. What difficulties exist if those different types of knowledge are to be captured and used by future employees?
3. What further challenges exist for organisations that want to share knowledge between existing employees?