Keep the Data

Once a company identifies key knowledge, it must develop the data-collection tools so that others can use it. In Illinois, where almost 10,000 out of nearly 60,000 state government workers have taken early retirement since 2003, a KM group has developed a database to capture the experience of buying government goods and services for the lowest prices. In the past, employees left without passing on the money-saving know-how. In one instance, the person responsible for buying cars and trucks for the state retired without leaving any information about vendors, prices or negotiating techniques. "When she retired, the new buyers had to start from scratch," says Paul Campbell, acting director of the Illinois Department of Central Management Services (CMS).

Illinois' central purchasing department, which spends close to $US8 billion a year, is facing heavy retirement in the coming decade. And it is not alone among government agencies - both state and federal. At NASA's Langley Research Centre, for example, the first national civil aeronautics laboratory, 55 percent of the workforce is eligible for retirement. In an attempt to prevent a further loss of knowledge as the baby boomers depart, the state created a procurement database that brings together information from past purchases and includes vendor and product comparisons. With less than a $US20,000 initial investment, the department built the system as an add-on to its Lotus Notes e-mail system, easing the training for workers already familiar with that program. Purchasers can now search the database before they start negotiations with a vendor. "Before we had this, our buyers were at the mercy of the vendors," Campbell says. Illinois is now working with Microsoft to create a Web-based state procurement system that will eventually include information from other states.

KM experts caution that databases, portals and other electronic repositories are often ignored by workers who would rather get information from colleagues. "There are plenty of databases out there that are graveyards," says DeLong. But in some cases, he adds, lessons-learned databases and other technical tools are the only means of keeping information at hand for future use. While mentoring, shadowing and communities of practice can help train newer employees and encourage more experienced workers to pass on their know-how, cataloguing key information as a reference can help cushion the blow of retirements. Common search tools and storage databases can then help retain such explicit knowledge.

At Bruce Power, a private nuclear power operator in Ontario, Canada, management saw the need for such tools several years ago when it became clear that 40 percent of its 3200 employees were nearing retirement age. Christophe Michel, Bruce's manager of technology solutions, started working on a project to create repositories of technical and HR information that employees can access from the Web. Using Kana IQ software, Michel and his colleagues have put together a dozen such repositories. One of the most successful in terms of usage, he says, focuses on technical questions related to welding, crucial for maintenance and safe operation of the plants.

In the past, he says, people would take pictures of welding jobs, for example, to share with colleagues, but the photos were not shared effectively. Now, images as well as technical instructions are available online. Michel says employees use the repositories if they save time and are useful to them. To encourage experienced workers to add information to the databases, the company measures such efforts on performance reviews. Michel didn't provide details on cost savings from the project, but says the initial investment paid for itself after one year by making up for the time workers used to spend trying to find the same information. Looking ahead, Michel says he hopes to motivate more workers to use the repositories by making the information available to them in the field on mobile devices.

Looking Ahead

At Northrop Grumman, times have changed since its massive downsizing in the 1990s. Although a large percentage of its workforce is nearing retirement, the average age of employees has dropped from the high 40s to the mid 40s in the past four years since the company started hiring more college grads. Shaffar says he is now working on balancing the more gradual transfer of knowledge from older to younger workers with the need to capture some crucial expertise quickly before it's too late. For example, Northrop Grumman engineers who are competing on a proposal for a "crew exploration vehicle", which is being designed to replace the space shuttle and travel to the moon (and eventually to Mars), met in August with a group of retirees who worked on the Apollo program that sent men to the moon more than 35 years ago.

Using a PC program called Quindi and a camera attached to a laptop, a facilitator recorded retirees telling stories about how they grappled with the technical problems of sending a man to the moon. These tales will be available as Webpages for engineers working on this project. Shaffar acknowledges that employees would rather go to another person than a system for advice, but he says the exercise helped capture knowledge that otherwise soon would be gone.

Most important, Shaffar has learned that the problem goes beyond looking at what skills you have right now. "There have always been new generations, and we're not any different in that way," he says. "Mentoring, training and passing on knowledge is not something you can do at the last minute. You have to plan ahead."