Business Week and Professional Immortality

Business Week just published a must-read article called "The Knowledge Handoff: How corporations are scrambling to tap the expertise of baby boomers before they retire." I'm really glad to see this story being picked up. Many of the companies I talk to, from pharmaceuticals to construction, are worried sick over the expertise that is coming up for retirement in the next 10 years. They're desperate to retain it, but don't know how.

Business Week got some important things right here. Most importantly, the stories recognizes that companies won't solve the problem by cramming employees into classrooms and handing aging boomers a piece of chalk. Instead, the article counsels that "companies should encourage soon-to-be retirees to use digital tools like wikis, blogs, and instant messaging." Business Week frames the issue as a generational gap, arguing that boomers need to use high-tech tools to communicate with Gen Y'ers.

Business Week is giving good advice, but for the wrong reasons. It's not that Gen Y'ers can only communicate on wikis and IM. The real insight--the one I wish Business Week had focused on--is that when employees use Enterprise 2.0 tools (like wikis and blogs) to collaborate, they create valuable assets which endure even after their creators have retired. If more boomers did their work in collaborative tools instead of emails and other private forms of correspondence, their colleagues would retain access to their ideas post-retirement. Just think of it as professional immortality.

Professional immortality. If that's not a good reason to use a collaborative tool, I don't know what is.

Comments

[Pim]

You got a point here. I recently watched a Shell wiki presentation where this point was told literally: some guys who were soon to retire were sharing knowledge like mad men on wiki's and blogs because they could not live with the idea that they left Shell with all their unshared knowledge.

[Justin Franks]

Thanks for the link. As a Web 2.0 consultant, whenever I am asked about Web 2.0 and knowledge management, I like to say that knowledge management is a free byproduct of working with Web 2.0 tools. Even if people are unwilling to devote their time to dumping their brains into a blog over the last few years of their careers, if you can get them to work in the open, you can at least capture whatever new knowledge they still will be creating, as well as whatever past knowledge/experience they might share anecdotally with project teams.

[Michael Idinopulos]

Pim,
I did the same thing when I left my previous job, all the while thinking "Why am I just doing this now?" Is the Shell wiki presentation publicly available?

[Pim]

Michael,

The presentation is not publicly available anymore. I got the presentation though (in dutch, 7 pages.) I can send it by e-mail if you like.

[David Gaines]

26% of my firm's staff is over 55. My team works and supports many of these people. We only document in wiki form. We focus not only on knowledge capture but are trying to find the best mode of transfer and dissemination of that knowledge. One of my teams just finished implementing a (small) technology project without ever setting foot in a meeting room - Web 2.0 tools were used for documentation, validation, project management, communication and training.

[Martin Koser]

I really like this catchy phrase "professional immortality", nice one.

Might help in motivating some boomers to document and share their knowledge, but I'm a bit hesitant all the while: It's not only motivation that is hard, it's the whole thing, i.e. knowing what to tell, what's worth the effort etc. And it's even harder as some of the best knowledge we have is neither evident to us (it's implicit) nor can it be codified and put down on paper.

Still the aim of creating environments for knowledge transfer is a good one, but we know that it's not documentation help or tools that they need. I guess it's rather the open-minded (wiki-style) collaborative culture that may come with blogs, wikis etc. - that is when they're employed as "vehicles" of change management?