Put a stopper in your brain drain

As the workforce ages and retires, many smart people are leaving companies without anyone of equal knowledge taking their place. That makes it more important to have a network over which you can “manage knowledge.”

According to a new report, “Web 2.0 - The Inflection Point for Knowledge Management,” the merging of several factors, such as an aging workforce, an ever increasingly reliable commercial Internet and an evolved technology set of Knowledge Management (KM) tools, provide hope for those organizations feeling the effects of brain drain.

Benjamin Friedman, research manager at Manufacturing Insights and author of the report, says organizations should focus on knowledge management initiatives that combine prescriptive, case based reasoning, with informal solutions such as Instant Messenger (IM). 

“Assuming the emerging workforce is familiar with working in a Facebook environment, this is a very good way for communities that have a unity of vision to share best practices,” he told me, adding that even a supply chain that relies on the tried and tested tools of materials handling needs knowledge management.

“People have relied on 2D or RFID technologies to manage the flow of things between locations,” he continued. “That relies on IT, which removes the human element. If you tie those sensor technologies to a human best practice, such as managing inventory levels in cold storage or food movement, they’re subject to being victims of IT failures. If you have a Web 2.0 tool on top of that, the flow of information across locations will be much better. Less trained employees will benefit from this type of information exchange. It levels the playing field.”

But there are challenges where supply chain management is concerned. Different supply chains have to establish common user practices to establish a free-flowing information environment. These are organizations with different command structures, and they can be both inside and outside your organization. So the decision-makers in those organizations must agree on what kind of information is postable, sharable, and desirable.

Friedman noted that the Dept. of the Navy established a collaboration network extending from the front lines all the way to the Pentagon, and they use it to handle various issues, from managing their supply chains to exploding unexploded improvised explosive devices.

If your organization is suffering from an explosion of retirements, transfers and exits, tell me how you’re protecting the integrity of your knowledge base—or if you are.