When Northrop Grumman was forced to lose 12,000 staff, they learned the key to retaining workers’ knowledge lay in content management.

In 1997, defense industry giant, Northrop Grumman felt the pinch when the U.S government started to reduce its defense spending. The company knew they had a problem coming up - in that they were about to see a major fall-off in demand for the B-2 bombers that it produced. They also knew they would have to lay off around 12,000 staff, mainly engineers, who had helped design and maintain the B-2 bomber.

Northrop Grumman recognized that when these staff departed, so would the vast amount of experience and knowledge that they had built up over the years. They knew they would have to find a way to retain the knowledge of those workers, in order to support the long-term maintenance of the B-2 bomber and benefit the smaller workforce that would be undertaking the work. So a knowledge management team was set up to interview and videotape experts in maintenance and design fields to capture their expertise. But the company found this system lacking. Scott Schaffer, Northrop Grumman's director of knowledge management recalls: "We did lose some of that knowledge. In an exit interview, you can capture certain things but not a lifetime of experience."

Eight years later, the company has learned to anticipate potential “brain drains”. They have also come to recognize that worker’s knowledge can be lost, not only during lay offs, but in other situations, such as, when people move jobs or retire. They now have various systems in place to make sure nothing else is lost and have worked diligently to retain the knowledge that their workers have accumulated. They’ve started programs that enable older and younger workers to exchange information, either in person or via e-mail. They also have common work spaces that record how an engineer did his job, for future reference. Plus, they have methodically built a content management system to capture and organize all this information.

Clear advantages

There are clear advantages to using a content/document management system in any company or organization. A content management system ensures the knowledge of a few key individuals is made readily available to others who need it. The result is that less experienced workers can access experts’ knowledge when and where they need it, without being dependent on the availability of that expert. It also means vital knowledge is not lost when people leave a company. And also, that productivity and efficiency can be improved, as people can use existing expertise rather than having to go through their own trial-and-error experiences.

Scott Schaffer clearly recognizes the value of using such a system. He explained that he works closely with Northrop Grumman's IT department, spending around 50% of the knowledge management budget on IT alone. "How would engineers connect across the US if they didn't have email, instant messaging or document management systems?" he said.

In a nutshell

A content management system scans, stores and retrieves documents received or created by an organization. It optimizes the use of these documents independent of any publishing medium (for example, the Web or MS Word files). It provides a document repository coupled with robust metadata to describe the content it contains. The system can track the editorial history of each document and its relationships with other documents, and it will also have a variety of search and navigation methods to make document retrieval simple.

It is, however, vital, particularly in a large organization where there are several users, that the document management system being used has a solid and flexible archiving infrastructure, as this will make it easier for end-users to feed, store and index documents without the need to worry about speed, formats or disk space.

Brain drain

Brain drains occur in all companies and are very expensive; however, according to a 2005 survey by global management consultants Accenture, many U.S. organizations are failing to capture critical workforce knowledge and experience from older employees facing retirement, and few organizations are transferring that knowledge to newer employees.

The survey of more than 500 full-time U.S. workers between 40 and 50 years of age found that nearly half of respondents' organizations do not have formal workforce planning processes or tools in place to capture their workers knowledge when they retire.

Additionally, it found that a quarter of respondents said that their organizations will let them retire without any transfer of knowledge. Just 20 percent said they anticipate an intensive, month-long process of knowledge transfer prior to their leaving. While 28 percent said they expect the knowledge-transfer process to last one or two weeks. Finally, the survey found 16 percent think their retirement will be preceded by an informal chat with others in the organization.

Accenture's Kathy Battitoni is worried about the findings, “If they don't act soon, organizations will face a major exodus of institutional knowledge, as their most experienced employees leave the workforce,” she says. “With more than 25 percent of the current working U.S. population reaching retirement by 2010, companies must undertake workforce development and training initiatives to capture knowledge and minimize its loss. Additionally, they must support these initiatives with technology, which can help capture critical information and distribute it directly to employees' desktops.”

DCLnews Editorial
February 28th, 2006