Over the last two years I have had the opportunity to work with several mid and senior level leaders as they grapple with the new realities in leading today's knowledge workers. With workplace demographics changing rapidly, leaders are facing complex challenges with workforce development, training, and overall management of the three primary age groups.
Rob Salkowitz identifies these groups as the Baby Boomers, the GenXrs, and the Millenials.
What we see happening in today's workplace is a monumental technology shift that is empowering
workers of all ages to conduct their work in ways that before Web 2.0 would have only been seen in sci-fi movies.
Web 2.0 technology, a more user friendly set of hardware and software tools and applications, are allowing workers to become less confined to a brick and mortar location to do their work. In fact the younger generation of Mellanials, who grew up on technology, are the lead group of today's workers who can multi-task and and are pushing the envelop to get older bosses and business owners to embrace Web 2.0 as a natural part of the workday.
The addition of social networking applications, blogs and open source content management systems are turning the business culture upside down and older workers are struggling to keep up with not only the technology, but with the cultural implications of this new way of managing people, processes and technology.
The movement that has started is called Knowledge Management. While the term has been around for several years, it has recently become the buzz words of today's workplace with the aide of both Web 2.0 and the internet.
Whether you are a small business or a multi-national company, all of them have one thing is common. To grow successfully, you must unleash the creativity and talent of your employees. To do that, you must have effective communications, and one of the best ways to communicate is to build a knowledge management system using an intranet as its backbone. An intranet is nothing more than a private internet in your organization. It is a powerful tool to capture creativity, intellectual capital, and to link company subject matter experts to each other.
Implementing an intranet as part of your knowledge management system is only part of the solution. Intranets are easy to create, but getting workers to use it is another matter.
Because of its importance as the primary tool in a KM environment, KM must be viewed as a strategy with senior management leading its implementation. Yet, many of today's managers and leaders are from the GenX or Baby Boomer crowd and are reluctant to change their management styles that embraces going to meetings versus collaborating and sharing information through a web portal like an intranet.
The future wave of aging boomers who will retire in the next 5-7 years is going to create a tidal wave of lost intellectual capital when they leave unless current leadership does something about lowering that risk. One way to lessen this risk is improving your own comprehension of how to be an effective knowledge manager in 21st Century organizations.
By learning more about KM, Intranets, and Web 2.0 technology, you will position yourself to be highly sought after leader for today's most successful organizations. They need your skills and talents as the new experts in leading today's empowered workers.
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1350
Date Published :
Feb 2 2009