Knowledge continuation

One of the more serious issues facing companies in the short term is that of knowledge continuation. As the baby-boomers go off into the long grass we, (Gen-X and others) are going to have to carry on without the benefit of their years of experience.

And what a lot of experience it has been! Dramatic changes in technology, dramatic changes in workforce management, dramatic changes in the way we speak to each other and other methods of communication, and so on and so forth.

As the baby boomers are moving up and out, those coming in to replace them are less and less. Not only are the numbers reduced but the types of skills are also different. Baby boomers learned their trade stripping down pumps and rebuilding them. Today most of this work is sent out to contract and employed fitters are there to replace parts generally. Also today's maintenance worker is more aware of reliability, more tuned in to sophisticated tools and techniques, and more conversant with technologically advanced equipment.

So we are not replacing like for like! Skills by themselves are a problem. No doubt! Economies are changing, service based work is on the rise, labor is expensive, and young people are opting for other career paths. So we are starting to get a skills crunch!

However, unlike others, I am less concerned about this than I am about knowledge. In my home country of Australia we often face skills shortages. We have a large and growing economy, particularly the resources sectors, and we only have 18 million people to do all the work. So Australia often has to look to its neighbor's to provide labor at reasonable prices.

Ethical? Not my call. Reality? Yes. Thinking that the skills to do the work within one country need to be found and generated within the same country is an out-dated approach to workforce management.

I have no doubt that as skills crunches increase this will be another phenomenon that becomes global just as out sourcing of everything technical has done in recent time.

So skills have a solution, and there are many other solutions. What does not currently have a solution is the leakage of knowledge from our companies. This is a more dramatic issue.

An anecdotal example from the water industry of the UK:

An elderly operator in a wastewater plant within the UK used to walk his dog every morning prior to commencing work. As he did so he walked past his plant and cleaned out a filter that he knew would cause problems if he left it undone.

Recently this gentleman passed away. Within two weeks there were significant environmental breaches generated from this plant, it was finally brought under control by instituting a regular preventive restoration task, cleaning, of the filter on a daily basis.

However, it highlighted sharply the effects of knowledge loss for this company. Nobody knew this task was required, except for the elderly operator who had been there for >10 years, and nobody had even the faintest idea that it was being done regularly!

This is the challenge of knowledge continuation, not so much skills shortages (although these are important) but the drain of asset specific knowledge. Things such as:

- What is being done today that we do not have captured within corporate management systems?
- How do we manage infrequent emergencies that these guys have experience of?
- How do we most efficiently manage the once every 10 or 15 year major task that they worked on and none of their replacements will have probably even heard of?
- What would happen to day if all the 50+ people in your company were to walk out the door?

The practice of recording this knowledge onto paper or a PC with the intention that somebody else will pick up this paper and read it is not knowledge continuation.

The challenge is to codify the knowledge that senior people hold, place it into a usable fashion (such as expert systems or decision guides etcetera) and make these part of the day to day running of the company. The challenge is:
- determining what is useful knowledge out of the current employees
- Codifying this so it can be put to work
- Make it available and improve it so that the future users of it get the improved version, not just a piece of paper to read through!

Good luck!