Tacit and explicit knowledge capture in business management

¶ … Knowledge Management Can Save a Company from "Knowledge Walkouts"

The aging of workforces globally and specifically in the United States has amplified the need for companies to automate, manage and publish their content and knowledge more effectively than ever before. While "knowledge walkouts" being most driven by the major demographic shift of baby boomers retiring, companies also need to keep in mind the cyclical nature of employment. On this latter point, in periods of low unemployment and the need for workers, battling in industries based on salaries is common. This is the second type of "knowledge walkout" and can occur at any time, with the most valuable of employees. While employee churn is certainly a significant issue, the demographic shift occurring today is going to have much more lasting effects and takes precedence over the churn issue.

The need for a much closer level of coordination on content and knowledge within companies is being driven by the large number of workers who will be retiring within the next two decades. Companies must plan today to retain the knowledge their aging workforce has gained through decades of experience. At the forefront of this dynamic are the number of workers who comprise the baby boom generation, who are by definition those people born between 1946 and 1964.

About 75 million baby boomers were born in the U.S. between 1946 and 1964. By 1999, the generation, including in-migrants from other countries, totaled 77 million.

The 77 million baby boomers represent about 37% of the nation's total population 16 years of age and older. They will continue to represent a significant portion of the population until at least 2025, when they will be 65 million, ranging in age from 61-79, and will still make up 25% of the population 16 and older.

In 2000, baby boomers ranged in age from 36 to 54. In 2001 the first of the generation will be 55, and in some pension systems eligible to retire. Between 2000 and 2025, the population that is 55 years of age and older will increase more sharply than any other age group.

For many companies there needs to be a pronounced level of urgency surrounding content and knowledge management strategies. When baby boomers' impact on the workforce is considered, the urgency to get content and knowledge management strategies in place becomes critical. Strategically speaking, for many organizations the ability to retain, organize, publish and grow content and knowledge within their companies is the biggest strategic risk they face in the coming ten years. Content and knowledge management strategies need to be at the forefront of every company's business and it strategy as their core intellectual property - the knowledge of their workers - must be captured before these workers leave on retirement according to Bell and Knox (2005).

Statement of the Problem

The drain of intellectual property that is imminent due to the demographic shifts occurring in the market must be addressed quickly and thoroughly with thorough content and knowledge management strategies. This paper will specifically discuss strategies for managing the creation of enterprise content management (ECM) and ensuing knowledge management strategies to alleviate the loss of key intellectual property as key employees retire (Easterby-Smith, Prieto, 2008).

To gain an appreciation for the full impact from a human resource management perspective of baby boomers retiring, consider that the median age of all workers in the U.S. economy will rise through the year 2020. Consider these additional facts as well relating to the implications of an aging workforce on the ability of companies to retain key content and knowledge:

In 1985, the median age of workers was 35; by 2008, the median age is projected to be nearly 41 (and covered by age discrimination protections, which begin at age 40 under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act).

The baby boom generation has had higher labor force participation rates than previous generations. By 2008, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that more than 62 million workers (over 40% of the labor force) will be 45 and older, and 37 million of these will be between the ages of 45 and 54. This means there will be over 16 million older workers in 2008 than there were in 1998 (a 37% increase). The number of young workers, 16 to 24 years old, is also projected to increase (by 15.1%), but those in the 35- to 44-year-old range will actually decline by about 7%.

These key demographic trends influence the retention of intellectual property across every department, functional area, strategy, initiative, and most critically of all, across key supplier, buyer, customer, channel partner, and reseller relationships. The core strengths of any company to compete then are impacted directly by the ability to coordinate the capturing of knowledge so it can efficiently be used in the planning, execution, and fulfillment of key strategies (Patrucco, 2008). Clearly what's needed is a series of frameworks to organize the strategies aimed at knowledge capture and management. From the over-arching approach of Enterprise Content Management to the definition of Knowledge Frameworks, (Oshri, Fenema, Kotlarsky, 2008) the implications for any company who has baby-boomer age experts in their core business areas must take action to accumulate, manage and apply the knowledge that these employees have today.

Findings

Alleviating the risk of losing intellectual property from "knowledge walkouts" begins with the structure of a content and knowledge management framework. One of the cornerstones of these frameworks is the definition of an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) infrastructure. Creating a consistent ECM architecture and defining its key components is critical in the development of an over-arching and scalable knowledge management strategy.

Defining Enterprise Content Management

In evaluating the body of research on enterprise content management and knowledge management, the following key insights immediately emerge. First, there is the need to define what a consolidated enterprise content management strategy means in the company or organization of interest. For many companies this entails breaking down the barriers between the many repositories of data, synchronizing up the taxonomies that vary significantly across business units, and creating a single version of the truth through global initiatives to make content more responsive to strategy needs according to Olson (2006). Second, the link of enterprise content management and knowledge management needs to be defined in the context of global knowledge management frameworks. Third, best practices in knowledge management is emerging rapidly in other strategic areas, over and above being insurance from "knowledge walkouts" and the loss of key intellectual property from employee churn. These companies attaining best practices focus on turning knowledge management frameworks into a competitive advantage by focusing on the following strategic initiatives:

Meeting compliance mandates - Including a range of issues such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), Department of Defense regulations, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and emerging green laws like Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) and Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE).

This is being driven by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002) in addition to other legislation.

Improving market agility - Capturing, distributing, sharing, and synchronizing information; most often product information, more readily and effectively with suppliers, business partners, and customers.

Supporting Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) - Supporting the needs of research, engineering, and development organizations that must collaborate on a wide range of structured and rich information assets.

Advertising, marketing, and promotion - Providing high quality, branded information to customers through various media and sales channels.

Customer support - Offering responsive systems for customer service and self-service initiatives, ensuring the quality of information presented to customers, and relaying information quickly to engineering and development organizations.

Information worker productivity and knowledge management- Helping alleviate employee inefficiency and a variety of urgent issues, including impending departure of retiring employees.

Structuring Enterprise Content is the first step to Knowledge Management

What exacerbates and hastens the need for knowledge management strategies is the chaotic nature of content management systems. Figure 1 provides an example of what a typical organization's content management structure is prior to the development of an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) to capture, coordinate, synchronize and eventually use in strategies the content and knowledge scattered throughout the organization. It is useful to remember that Figure 1 is the schematic, if you will, of the network employees must rely on for their information, making their jobs chaotic as well. Figure 1: Content in Chaos

When an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is put into place and made the foundation of knowledge management strategies, an entirely different structure to content creation, organization, syndication and use comes into play. This is significant to reducing "knowledge walkouts" as it creates a solid framework for organizing knowledge. Figure 2 represents what a prototypical ECM framework looks like from a schematic standpoint. The key take-away from this graphic is that once an stable framework is in place for content, stability and order come to knowledge management. The implications of this are significant in that organizations can then make existing employees more productive through the use of more actionable content, yet also create a structure for capturing the knowledge of key contributors who are part of the baby boomer generation retiring in the next few decades (Oshri, Fenema, Kotlarsky, 2008).

Figure 2: ECM is the foundation of solid knowledge management

Source: Establishing a True Source of Product Content for Competitive Advantage,

AMR Research (Murphy (2003))

Retaining the knowledge to overcome "knowledge walkouts"

From the basis of an ECM architecture or framework, organizations can begin to successively learn and accumulate knowledge from its employees. The true intelligent enterprise is one with the capacity to learn from the collective experience of successive generations of workers and use its history to its advantage according to Gartner (2005). The most successful organizations are those that most effectively use the skills, expertise, and knowledge of their workers, whether incoming, outgoing, or somewhere in between.

With the urgency of an aging workforce facing companies around the world (the impending retirement of valuable knowledge workers), it's easy to lose a sense of balance. Stemming the brain drain, for many companies, means putting every ounce of effort into capturing what's in an employee's head before she walks out the door. HR organizations exert extraordinary effort here, urging departing employees to use their dwindling time to document their knowledge and cram it into a repository (Kimmerle, Wodzicki, Cress, 2008).

Knowledge Management for Many Organizations: Use it or Lose it

The fact that there are organizations whose knowledge management systems are best practices for their given industry, and have processes in place for capturing and retaining excellent components of their knowledge are still the fact that it must be used to be effective according to Gartner (2006). Based on "the last mile" of knowledge management so to speak being these processes of selectively applying the content to specific business strategies and challenges, the indexing, search, and retrieval of knowledge in these repositories becomes a completely separate issue.

Once in the repository, there's little guarantee that the valuable knowledge ever emerges again. In fact, it's not valuable at all without a thorough consideration for the way new workers will access it and put it to use. Getting workers to change how they do their jobs is also a critical aspect of capturing content, according to the Hard Side of Change Management (2005).

Certainly, search engines, portal frameworks, content management, collaboration platforms, expertise location, and e-learning systems have geared themselves to addressing these problems according to Columbus and Murphy (2002).. Business process management (BPM) is also playing an increasingly vital technology role, as embedding knowledge into codified processes is an effective way to ensure companies learn from experience.

Knowledge for the new workforce

What is very apparent from the research and findings for this paper is the fact that companies have got to think ahead. Better knowledge management strategies must account for and capitalize upon the skills and expertise of the incoming workforce, along with the tools they're already accustomed to and adept at using (Evans, 2007).

Many of the new workers entering a company interact with information in far different ways from the exiting old workers. The new workforce grew up on the web, using instant messaging as opposed to e-mail, thumbing shorthand text messages on cell phone keypads, and creating and offering their mySpace profiles and blogs to the world.