UPFRONT Well… what do you know?

It is serious question – and one likely to be asked more frequently and in more varied ways as more organisations recognise the importance of capturing and managing knowledge.
Knowledge can be an ephemeral sort of quarry. Sure there’s all the grunty, practical stuff of how widgits fit into whatsits and the copious process manuals or detailed databases. But what about the stuff that sits in people’s heads – experiences, tactics, relationships, networks, intuitive learning or tacit understanding.
Take “Peter”. He’s been in sales management role at company X for decade or more, has developed great customer relations and is the first port of information call for both his senior and junior colleagues. Now he’s about to retire.
That will leave big hole in what IBM’s global expert in critical knowledge retention and author Eric Lesser calls the social network fabric. “Companies spend lot of time on the formal networks – the box and arrows reporting relationships – but from knowledge perspective it’s the informal networks and how they are supported that matters most,” says Lesser.
“Mature workers who have built lot of relationships – people who may not always have the answer but know where and how to find them – are the knowledge brokers who get threatened in an environment where people are retiring. They leave holes in the social fabric that make it difficult for knowledge to pass through.”
Lesser was in New Zealand last month explaining why “grey matter matters” and why there’s lot of it walking out the door. There will, he says, be whole bunch of “Peters” inadvertently draining vital and valuable knowledge from their organisations as the baby boomer generation starts retiring over the next decade. An aging workforce is one of the trends set to seriously affect the supply of organisational knowledge. “It’s problem hitting at both global and local levels and it’s one that kind of sneaks up on people. There may be couple of defections, then they’re suddenly asking ‘where did everyone go?'”
Estimates suggest nearly one fifth of America’s middle and senior managers will retire by 2008 and more than half all federal employees (71 percent at executive level) are eligible for retirement in 2005. To that rather sizeable knowledge drain can be added other workplace trends like less loyalty, higher staff turnover and increasing numbers of self-employed contractors or leased employees, and you have growing supply side problem.
Then there’s the demand side of the equation: globalisation, outsourcing, the rise of partnerships, joint ventures or alliances (ie, greater scattering of organisational knowledge), and increases in both product and service complexity. “We have this transition from pure product economy to value-added services economy so being able to tap into organisational know-how and use that to deliver more personalised kinds of services, or generate new revenue streams has become more critical,” says Lesser.
“If you think of it as an equation, the supply of knowledge is more at risk precisely at the time when knowledge is becoming an asset that companies can leverage to achieve success in the marketplace.”
How that knowledge is extracted depends on raft of factors related to the organisation, the knowledge holders and the nature of the knowledge. It could be written down, experiential or built into particular work process or activity.
“The determination of what technique to use is dependent on what knowledge needs to be captured, what positions are at risk, and the distance between the person who has it and person who needs it,” says Lesser.
And it pays to be strategic about what is captured. “You can’t do this for everything. That’s where some organisations come unstuck. You must identify what knowledge is critical to make the business successful then focus on its preservation.”
Then make sure the captured knowledge remains alive and relevant, says Lesser. “Many companies make the mistake of getting excited about creating databases and [knowledge] repositories. They build an intergalactic database in the sky and couple of things happen. Nobody sees the relevance of what they’re doing so they ignore it or, the opposite, everyone contributes and no one can find anything or discern its relevance.
“Smart companies have either content manager or group whose role is to make sure that the knowledge is used and that it is formatted so it is easily absorbed and its value readily tapped.”
Are companies getting the knowledge management message?
They started to in the mid to late 1990s, says Lesser, but the dot-com bust pushed it aside in favour of cost-cutting strategies. “It’s only in the past six to 12 months that there’s been resurgence of more grounded interest. It’s not just what toys and tools can we play with, but how do we solve business challenges with this? [Knowledge management] is getting more mainstream acceptance. And HR organisations in particular are starting to look at their workforce demographic profile and to ask what areas are at risk, not just in terms of an HR issue, but as business operational risk issue.”