Workforce attrition, whether due to an ailing economy or an aging staff heading for retirements, can create a knowledge deficit that manufacturing companies can ill afford. To mitigate the risks, progressive manufacturers will develop strategic knowledge management initiatives.

In a recent report, Benjamin Friedman, research manager at Manufacturing Insights, an IDC company, points to a number of converging trends that will help companies achieve their knowledge management goals, including an “increasingly reliable commercial Internet and an evolved technology set of knowledge management tools.” This will “make the current Knowledge Management iteration different from collaboration technology movements of the past,” the report, “Web 2.0 — The Inflection Point for Knowledge Management,” states.

In addition to the emergence of commercial Web 2.0 collaboration technologies, the report examines the evolving knowledge management applications field. Manufacturing Insights encourages manufacturers to pursue a hybrid strategy, mixing structural and prescriptive elements, such as case-based reasoning, which relies on past data to solve problems, with informal solutions, such as Instant Messenger, that offer information flow at the speed of thought.

“This approach to knowledge management delivers agility in decision making and knowledge reuse opportunities over the long term,” the report states.