| Summary: | In the keynote of Executive Workshop on the Aging Workforce in the Utility Industry held
in April 2006 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Erroll Davis highlighted the
following fact:
“The U.S. Bureau of Labour reports that the U.S. will face a shortage of 12 million
qualified skilled workers by 2010.” (George, 2006).
According to Krishna (2006) as many as 300,000 power utility workers within the U.S. are
expected to retire over the next 15 years. Capturing and disseminating industry
experience will be essential combined with effective communities of practice.
These statement alone indicate why the virtual access to knowledgeable people will
become a very important feature of any electronic knowledge platform (eKP). No longer is
it practical to have a ratio of 1:1 in terms of students to mentors. Mentors are also not able
to attend to the needs of apprentices entering the power industry. There has to be a
balance between sharing the knowledge of a mentor in an explicit way (i.e. documents,
decision support trees, questions and answers) and enabling knowledge workers seeking
advice to contact the specialist when the available literature and tools are not self
explanatory or doesn’t cover the particular problem.
The challenge of today’s knowledge economy is the skills shortage and lack of sufficient
people to mentor and train others on the job. The proof-of-concept (POC) presented in
this dissertation is focussed on an electrical utility company in South Africa. Knowledge
management is a multi-disciplinary field and touches on human and the technology
aspects to address the problems experienced by knowledge management practitioners
and managers.
This dissertation focuses on how information technology (IT) could be used to assist in
determining an electronic knowledge collaboration indicator that will give managers a tool
to objectively measure and control retention of knowledge gained by individuals
throughout their careers within an organisation. A central platform, namely Hyperwave, a
commercially available software environment, combined with an effective search and
indexing engine called “Autonomy” is used for the proof-of-concept (POC).
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