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With increasingly competitive environments and struggling economies, today's organizations are trying to stay afloat in rough waters. Internal and external pressures are placing demands on organizations that are affecting their competitive edge. Those organizations that are "continuously learning," adaptive and agile will be the most likely to survive. Part of reaching that goal is based on harnessing and leveraging the human capital in the organization. That is where knowledge retention and transfer techniques can be used to capture, share, apply, leverage and possibly create knowledge before employees leave the organization, or to onboard new employees to quickly get them up to speed.
Organizations that are embracing knowledge retention activities are gaming a competitive advantage. For example, according to the 2010 APQC (apqc.org) Knowledge Management Conference, Pfizer (pfizer.com) boosted efficiency by 15 percent with an easy-to-use, shared note-taking program. Organizations need to be concerned about knowledge retention. For example, about 90 percent of the U.S. government's 8,000 top-ranking senior executives are eligible for retirement, according to an April 21, 2010, article in The Washington Post. Organizations with management leadership that is weaving knowledge retention within its succession planning, work force development and human capital strategies should fare well in the future. Strong managerial leadership is positively correlated to the retention of key people, based on Nick Bontis and Alexander Serenko's work in Canada.
No strategy, no budget
Without strong leadership and a knowledge retention program, the enterprise will sub-optimize and be vulnerable to potential knowledge loss, such as with the U.S. nuclear energy industry. With renewed excitement in nuclear energy in the United States after years of disinterest, many individuals who possess knowledge of the construction, operations and maintenance of nuclear power plants are very senior and nearing retirement. With the help of the Nuclear Energy Institute (nei.org) and the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (inpo.info), interest is focused on filling those knowledge gaps through knowledge transfer and retention programs.
Surprisingly, few organizations seem to have a formal knowledge retention (KR) strategy or even a KR standard operating procedure (SOP). According to a January 2009 Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp.org) report on knowledge retention, in which more than 420 organizations responded, about 77 percent indicated they don't have an owner for KR initiatives, and about...