Identifying Knowledge Management Issues at GDD
The impending retirement of Harry, the head aeronautics engineer with over 25 years of experience at GDD, represents a major knowledge management challenge and a source of potential organizational memory loss for the company (Dalkir, 2013). Harry possesses vast reserves of specialized expertise and tacit knowledge accumulated over his long tenure related to vital areas like airplane purchasing, maintenance requirements, vendor relationships, cost analyses, and evaluating emerging technologies. However, this knowledge has yet to be formally documented or codified within GDD. Once Harry leaves, this contextual knowledge and experience he has gained working on projects and decisions over decades will be lost without accessible records or knowledge transfer to other employees. As Dalkir (2013) emphasizes, the know-how of experts like Harry comprises invaluable organizational memory that must be deliberately captured and retained for future application. Allowing such a senior veteran employee to retire without strategies to preserve his specialized insights and undocumented history with the company risks extremely impactful knowledge loss that could lead to costly errors in future airplane procurement and maintenance decisions.
In addition to the loss of Harry’s considerable technical knowledge, the poaching of talented younger employees like sales managers by competitors such as UPS represents another significant knowledge management issue for GDD (Dalkir, 2013). When skilled professionals leave to join rival firms, they bring valuable knowledge about GDD’s inner workings, strategies, processes, customer relationships, technologies, and more. This knowledge drain directly enables competitors to erode GDD’s competitive advantage by enhancing their capabilities with stolen insider know-how. The fact that UPS has successfully poached multiple managers heightens the severity of this issue for GDD. Moreover, Amid’s concern about proprietary GDD knowledge leaving the company with departing employees signals critical risks around information security and retention of intellectual assets. Knowledge leakage to rivals severely compromises GDD’s market position. Effective knowledge transfer and retention strategies are urgently required to mitigate and avoid further loss of proprietary institutional memory as additional talent leaves GDD.
Additionally, the situation faced by the Asian branch shipping department head related to fixing major process failures due to inadequate time zone configurations demonstrates significant gaps in GDD’s approach to capturing and preserving institutional knowledge about core business operations and procedures (Hislop, Bosua & Helms, 2018). The company lacked accessible documentation of the contextual details and past precedent behind key processes, which led even simple changes to cause widespread disruptions and customer complaints. Existing protocols for analyzing and learning from prior process issues while updating procedural documentation need to be revised within GDD. Such a lack of organizational memory around business-critical operations will only lead to wasted time and resources spent on reinventing solutions, duplicated efforts, and fixing preventable problems. GDD must prioritize mapping, recording, and sharing knowledge about its core end-to-end processes to avoid the high costs of organizational amnesia around fundamental business procedures.
Costs of Organizational Memory Loss
Allowing the loss of organizational memory through workforce departures and lack of knowledge retention can incur major tangible and intangible costs for GDD now and in the future across multiple business areas (Dalkir, 2013).
Specifically, the loss of Harry’s decades of expertise in airplane purchasing and maintenance without sufficient knowledge transfer to successors would lead to very impactful costs. Any airplane acquisition decisions made without the ability to leverage Harry’s vast insider knowledge around factors like supplier negotiations, lifespan costs, maintenance needs, and fuel efficiencies will be far less optimal and informed (Dalkir, 2013). This could lead GDD to invest in unsuitable or overpriced airplane models that result in higher operating and maintenance expenses due to subpar fuel economy, more repairs, quicker replacement needs, and other unexpected costs from a lack of insights into hidden vendor tradeoffs. Airplane investments are very complex, high-value decisions that cannot afford to be made in a knowledge vacuum left by Harry’s departure. Subsequent attempts to reverse poor investments would carry heavy financial penalties. Without Harry’s technical and contextual knowledge to inform ongoing airplane procurement and maintenance, GDD risks consistently higher operating costs that erode profitability.
Additionally, losing rising talent like Amid to predatory competitors like UPS imposes significant costs on GDD as organizational knowledge leaks to rivals (Dalkir, 2013). The insights, skills, and insider information that departing managers transfer to competitors empower those companies to enhance their operations and market position using GDD’s hard-won intellectual capital, directly damaging GDD’s competitive advantage. UPS can apply GDD’s stolen knowledge to improve its services, processes, and strategy in ways that erode GDD’s market share, revenue, and customer relationships over time. This slow knowledge drain may also force GDD to invest substantial resources in retraining new hires to rebuild lost capabilities rather than focusing those investments on innovation and growth initiatives.
Moreover, the lack of documentation around business-critical processes that forced the Asian branch shipping department head to visit headquarters to fix failed delivery procedures imposes massive productivity costs on GDD from duplicated efforts and reinventing previous solutions (Hislop et al., 2018). Operational disruptions that impact customer experience can also carry heavy costs from claims, refunds, and loss of future sales. Access to past precedents and the rationale behind key processes is necessary for GDD to save resources to resolve the same issues over and over. As processes grow more complex with technological integration and global interconnections, undocumented processes become unstable and prone to failure from not understanding dependencies. Preventing such issues requires investments in codifying processes and building shared organizational memory.
Overall, the tangible and intangible ripple effects from GDD’s organizational memory loss around people, processes, and technology will compound over time, resulting in damaged competitiveness, declining decision quality, stifled innovation, and reduced agility to meet market demands (Webb, 2017; Girard & Girard 2015). Urgent knowledge retention strategies are imperative.
Capturing Tacit Knowledge
GDD can leverage four key strategies to capture and retain the valuable tacit knowledge of veteran employees like Harry before they retire to prevent irrecoverable organizational memory loss (Dalkir, 2013).
Firstly, conducting recorded interviews, oral histories, and exit debriefs with retiring experts like Harry can help codify their tacit insights and past experiences with the company related to key projects, initiatives, technologies, processes, and decisions (Dalkir, 2013). Tactfully facilitated discussions aim to draw out Harry’s contextual perspectives on factors that led to major aircraft procurement choices, tradeoffs weighed, maintenance insights over time, supplier relationship nuances, and more. These narratives can be transcribed, indexed, and made accessible digitally to supply future leaders and engineers with documented insights to guide decisions. According to Dalkir (2013), storytelling techniques are powerful for converting veteran employees’ undocumented know-how into retainable organizational memory.
Secondly, implementing structured mentoring programs and apprenticeships that partner retiring experts like Harry with younger engineers and successors like Imogine during their final months can facilitate the direct transfer of tacit knowledge through joint work (Webb, 2017). Such side-by-side mentoring enables veterans to directly share hard-earned insights with proteges through modeling, coaching, and guided practice. Programs can also connect veterans across the company with younger employees embarking on initiatives they tackled before, allowing direct knowledge sharing at the point of need. Partnerships with clear objectives and structured pathways for tacit knowledge transfer reduce knowledge loss.
Thirdly, GDD can promote a storytelling culture where employees openly share their concrete experiences, success stories, failures, learned lessons, and other tacit insights across the organization (Dalkir, 2013). Forums like “lesson learned” meetings, internal conferences for sharing challenges overcome, and podcasts/videocasts of employees recounting projects can make individual knowledge accessible company-wide. Peer-to-peer knowledge sharing builds connections and surfaces hidden insights. Encouraging candid storytelling makes tacit knowledge explicit for capture and application.
Fourthly, developing protocols and systems for consistently documenting key processes, decisions, organizational context, and the rationale behind them is vital for retaining institutional memory (Hislop et al., 2018). Instituting cross-functional knowledge harvesting workshops, decision audits, and procedures to analyze and codify processes can help convert tacit knowledge into standardized, shareable artifacts accessible across the company. Structured after-action reviews that candidly capture takeaways from major initiatives also solidify collective learning.
These personalized and systematic strategies for eliciting, sharing, and documenting tacit knowledge can help maximize GDD’s retention of veterans’ expertise. Blending human connections and technology solutions addresses multiple facets of tacit knowledge capture.
Leveraging Technology
GDD can leverage several strategic technology solutions to enable more effective knowledge capture, storage, sharing, and application across the company, reducing memory loss impacts when veteran employees with undocumented expertise leave (Girard & Girard, 2015).
Firstly, implementing a centralized, cloud-based document management system accessible securely across the enterprise can provide a single source of truth for capturing, storing, and distributing documents like past reports, cost-benefit analyses, case studies, aircraft specifications, process manuals, and project records (Dalkir, 2013). Codifying critical organizational knowledge in a searchable, shared repository preserves institutional memory. It reduces knowledge silos, ensuring leaders can find needed insights and experiences from the past to guide future actions.
Secondly, social collaboration platforms, including internal community forums, wikis, and shared drives, can provide adaptable spaces for employees to synthesize knowledge across boundaries (Hislop et al., 2018). As colleagues pose questions, discuss challenges, share documents, and comment on projects and subjects, collective knowledge emerges through these digital interactions. Public and private groups also facilitate peer learning. This breaks down silos and builds organizational knowledge.
Thirdly, business process management systems, case management tools, and data mining technologies offer automation capabilities to identify, map, document, analyze, and preserve institutional memory around GDD’s core operations, transactions, and decision workflows (Webb, 2017). Embedding process documentation activities into these platforms, along with data capture and analytics, allows human and digital knowledge to be combined into shareable artifacts that reduce the need to reinvent established solutions.
Fourthly, expertise location systems – including skills management databases, employee profiles, people finder applications, and social network mapping tools – provide greater visibility into workforce knowledge, experiences, and competencies beyond the limitations of previous interpersonal networks and hierarchies (Girard & Girard, 2015). This ability to quickly identify knowledgeable experts across the company based on need allows more targeted knowledge sharing. Advanced analytics further enable predicting and modeling future expertise needs.
Together, these knowledge-centric technologies provide integral infrastructure for retaining, sharing, finding, and applying knowledge, while integrating insights across people, processes, and content. With thoughtful user experience design and adoption guidance, they can make preservation of institutional memory a natural byproduct of employees’ daily workflows and interactions. However, GDD must still emphasize a human-centric culture of knowledge sharing across technological solutions.
References
Dalkir, K. (2013). Knowledge management in theory and practice. Routledge.
Girard, J., & Girard, J. (2015). Defining knowledge management: Toward an applied compendium. Online Journal of Applied Knowledge Management, 3(1).
Hislop, D., Bosua, R., & Helms, R. (2018). Knowledge management in organizations: A critical introduction. Oxford university press.
Webb, S. P. (2017). Knowledge management: Linchpin of change. Routledge.
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