Bye bye Baby Boomers – Don’t be left without the right answer

Many industries are facing the loss of knowledge workers and are challenged with capturing the inherent expertise gained from years of employee experience. For many industries it is suggested that they will be impacted greatly as the workforce transitions. The game has changed. Organizations need to capture existing knowledge and knowledge workers need to be able to access these intellectual assets to collaborate globally with diverse stakeholders, find organizational resources, identify experts, and leverage business insight to make informed decisions.

This is not an easy task and the approach will vary by organization. Many industries are becoming much more aware of the issue, but what is the solution? For many, dealing with ‘knowledge management’ is foreign and not integrated into the corporate culture, as it was not always seen as contributing to the bottom line. Solutions vary. One of the issues I have is the pendulum seems to be swinging radically the other way where ‘social’ features used in personal life are not being translated into business life. I really don’t care if someone ‘likes’ something or the search engine automatically ‘boosts’ items. I really don’t want to hamper my search with what I view is restrictions.

I see the solution as a combination of social tools with a structured framework. The result is the ability to deploy sophisticated knowledge applications to find relevant content by project, research, documentation, that is associated with a specific person. This requires the automatic culling and classification of information to meet the requirements of the individual end users through the delivery of relevant content in the right context, as well as to the right people at the right time.

What are your thoughts?