Managing aging workforce: filling the gap between what we know and what is in the system

Authors:
Shuhua (Monica) Liu;Raya Fidel
Affiliations:
University of Washington, Seattle, WA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA
Venue:
Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Theory and practice of electronic governance
Year:
2007

Citing 6
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Abstract

With the retirement of large groups of senior employees from public sectors in USA, valuable institutional and operational knowledge are also lost when these knowable individuals leave the organization. Although advanced information systems are implemented in public sectors to retain valuable knowledge in the organization, researchers repetitively found that gaps exist between what senior members know and what is available in the system for newcomers to use. How to retain knowledge held by senior employees in the organization becomes a huge challenge faced by public sector management. This study argues that when using mobile information systems to facilitate fieldworkers' task performance, public sectors need to pay close attention to three factors that might influence knowledge retaining and information reuse: Knowledge tacitness, Criteria of information relevance when it is related to specific tasks, and roles played by active employees, based on observations and interviews with employees using mobile information devices here in a public sector in the Northwest of the US. Furthermore, the conflict between lower management's perception on use of mobile devices and local operation priority is cited as one of the leading reasons why many information systems fail to serve as the main information tank for organizational sustainability.