Knowledge Management Strategies to Prevent Knowledge Walkouts

Introduction: The Knowledge Walkout Challenge

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" are most driven by the major demographic shift of baby boomers retiring, companies also need to keep in mind the cyclical nature of employment. In periods of low unemployment and high demand for workers, competing on salaries across industries is common. This is the second type of "knowledge walkout," and it can occur at any time, claiming a company's most valuable employees. While employee churn is certainly a significant issue, the demographic shift driven by baby boomer retirement 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 baby boomers — 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. These 77 million baby boomers represent about 37% of the nation's total population aged 16 and older. They will continue to represent a significant portion of the population until at least 2025, when they will number 65 million, ranging in age from 61 to 79, and will still make up 25% of the population aged 16 and older.

In 2000, baby boomers ranged in age from 36 to 54. In 2001, the first members of the generation turned 55 and became eligible to retire under some pension systems. Between 2000 and 2025, the population aged 55 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 is the single greatest strategic risk they face in the coming decade. 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 for retirement (Bell & 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 through comprehensive content and knowledge management strategies. This paper specifically discusses 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 human resource management impact of baby boomers retiring, consider that the median age of all workers in the U.S. economy will rise through the year 2020. Additional facts illustrate the implications of an aging workforce on a company's ability to retain key content and knowledge:

In 1985, the median age of workers was 35; by 2008, the median age was projected to be nearly 41 — an age covered by age discrimination protections, which begin at 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 projected that more than 62 million workers (over 40% of the labor force) would be 45 and older, with 37 million of these between the ages of 45 and 54. This means there were over 16 million more older workers in 2008 than in 1998 — a 37% increase. The number of young workers aged 16 to 24 was also projected to increase (by 15.1%), but those in the 35-to-44-year-old range were expected to decline by about 7%.

These key demographic trends influence the retention of intellectual property across every department, functional area, strategy, and initiative, and — most critically — across key supplier, buyer, customer, channel partner, and reseller relationships. The core strengths of any company to compete are therefore directly impacted by the ability to coordinate the capturing of knowledge so it can be efficiently used in the planning, execution, and fulfillment of key strategies (Patrucco, 2008). What is clearly needed is a series of frameworks to organize the strategies aimed at knowledge capture and management. From the overarching approach of enterprise content management to the definition of knowledge frameworks (Oshri, Fenema, & Kotlarsky, 2008), any company that has baby-boomer-age experts in its core business areas must take action to accumulate, manage, and apply the knowledge those employees possess today.

Defining Enterprise Content Management

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 to the development of an overarching and scalable knowledge management strategy.

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

Meeting compliance mandates — Including a range of regulatory requirements such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), Department of Defense regulations, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and emerging environmental laws such as the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) and Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directives. This is being driven in large part by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and related 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 addressing a variety of urgent issues, including the impending departure of retiring employees.

Structuring Enterprise Content as the Foundation of Knowledge Management

What exacerbates and hastens the need for knowledge management strategies is the chaotic nature of content management systems in most organizations. A typical organization's content management structure, prior to the development of an Enterprise Content Management system, consists of scattered, uncoordinated repositories that make it difficult to capture, coordinate, synchronize, and ultimately apply knowledge to strategy. It is worth noting that this fragmented structure is effectively the information network employees must rely on to do their jobs — making their work more chaotic as well.

When an Enterprise Content Management system is put into place and made the foundation of knowledge management strategies, an entirely different structure for content creation, organization, syndication, and use comes into play. This is significant to reducing "knowledge walkouts" because it creates a solid framework for organizing knowledge. Once a stable framework is in place for content, stability and order come to knowledge management as well. The implications are significant: organizations can then make existing employees more productive through the use of more actionable content, while also creating a structure for capturing the knowledge of key contributors who belong to the baby boomer generation retiring over the next few decades (Oshri, Fenema, & Kotlarsky, 2008).