Perspective: Gear up for baby boomers' exodus from tech

Baby boomers--the 76 million people born between 1946 and 1964--will begin to retire in droves at the end of this decade. Traditionally, most people retire in their early to mid-60s. If history holds true, that means tens of millions of people will soon exit the work force.

What's more alarming than the magnitude of this number is the amount of invaluable experience these people will take with them. These employees have what I call tribal wisdom, a repository of historical knowledge accumulated over the years that provides a complete and contextual picture of situations.

Businesses with a large population of soon-to-exit boomers will need to figure out how to capture and catalog this tribal wisdom and find a way to pass it down to the next generation of employees in some useful fashion. Otherwise, they will face severe challenges.

This is especially critical for problems or processes that span functional boundaries and for understanding their interrelated effects.

Let me offer an anecdote that gets at what I'm talking about. E&J Gallo Winery is a company with more than 4,600 employees and various automated decision-making systems, intranet portals, and knowledge management and business process tools. As you might imagine, Gallo also has a range of different bottling lines, some new, some very old.

What tribal wisdom isn't about is targeting and convincing specific people to work beyond retirement.

One of their lines for filling international orders hadn't been running at peak performance. A number of smart people tried but failed to fix the problem over the course of a week. Then a lone employee, who had worked in the bottling room for 30 years before retiring two years ago, spent a single hour observing how the machine functioned. Within no time, he got the system back to top form.

Tribal wisdom isn't, however, about is targeting and convincing specific people to work beyond retirement. Just the opposite. It's giving the younger generation of workers the opportunity and responsibility to implement change, improve business processes and preserve the tribal wisdom until it is no longer useful.

Tribal wisdom can embody a lot of different things. It can be all about preventive maintenance or devising instructions on how to ensure operational excellence, as in the case of Gallo's bottling line. But it could be something more sophisticated, such as anticipating and formulating situations, correlating and adjusting production events, and understanding the procedural bottlenecks in an organization.

Many companies are turning to new technologies to document, automate and improve work flows. They ultimately want to enable wider, real-time access to critical company knowledge. Enterprise technologies, in particular, that focus on business process automation are critical pieces of the puzzle.

That will be especially important in fields like health care and education, which traditionally have placed less emphasis on technology-driven productivity innovations. These technologies, combined with the right corporate policies and mechanisms, will help pass useful information to the front lines.

Tribal wisdom and the business processes it drives are the lifeblood of any organization. Businesses that figure this out are going to be a half step ahead of their competition. It's no exaggeration to say that tribal wisdom may eclipse databases as the most valuable of all corporate assets.

Biography
Vivek Ranadivé is founder and CEO of Tibco Software.

More Perspectives

[head gillmo]

To whom do we pass this tribal knowledge?

I am one of those fortunate enough to remember programming computers before there were windows, or even before the PC. I just wonder about one detail that you did not address in this article: To whom shall I pass on my "tribal knowledge?"

I have worked for in the avionics industry for most of my 25 years, taking a few years off to work for a large microprocessor company. I'm afraid that many of those coming into the industry now wish for everything to be handed to them. In the four years I worked for the microprocessor company, I spent only a few months actually writing code. The remainder of the time was spent attempting to integrate snippets of code that these "young guns" had found on the internet.

The sad part is that much of the avionics industry seems to be headed for the same fate. Just yesterday I spent an hour with someone who insisted that we use "free" software that had already been developed. Turns out that initial estimates would require more time to verify and validate this free software than for design, impementation, integration of software written and controlled in house.

Do you see? It seems that conventional wisdom is to look outside oneself, for that is where all knowledge lies. Maybe we need to look within for a change, and remember how those with the tribal knowledge got it.

[User Information Private]

Apprenticeships?

Remember when we started, there also wasn't any "tribal knowledge" to start from. It was all pretty much new stuff.

But the old world had a system for passing along knowledge that is still used in other area's today. Maybe it's time to bring apprenticeships to the computer industry.

Lord knows I can't count the number of times have had to teach some kid fresh out of college the difference between what they teach in school and what actually works in the real world.

[nextcube]

Use what you find - when appropriate

You make an excellent point that many programmers today expect to be able to go on the Internet and download code that does what they need it to do, an expectation that's not necessarily realistic. It certainly CAN save time and effort if done when appropriate, but it can waste just as much time if done when not.

Certainly, companies need to be thinking ahead, and start hiring the people that they need now, to build up another generation of personnel who know "what's what" in the organization. I've stepped into situations where the person before me up-and-left 8000 lines of code that needed to be debugged, fixed and enhanced - it wasn't fun to straighten that mess out. Imagine the task facing people who inherit today's huge ERP systems...

[aroonima]

Change at the school level

Perhaps the question to be asked here is why "youngsters" find it so lucrative to pick up bits of code. At the school and university level they are asked to do research and write and what this amounts to, is spending a few hours on the net, pulling up random articles and then cobbling together ideas. The smart ones will cite their work meticulously (and sometimes their work resembles a patchwork quilt) and the not so smart ones will plagiarise. When asked to think for themselves they are at a loss.

Every class of mine has had a few students who dare to think beyond the grade. It is a risk that I reward, but it is effort that few are willing to expend. However, given that this approach to knowledge is also widely prevalent in the publish and perish atmosphere of academia, one cannot really fault the students too much.

In addition, when I refer to the nineties and the politics and policies thereof, I feel like I am teaching ancient history. As a community we have stopped teaching history as an appreciation of the passage of time. We teach it as an accumulation of facts. Therefore, the "young guns" have no real feel for what came before them and lack perspective when it comes to locating their contributions within the larger knowledge base.

[bigvoice--2008]

born in 1945 (still baby boomer?)

I found your article rather interesting since I will be one of those people exiting a communications giant within the next five years. We have always called it the old work environment. It is true that people like me have a lot of background knowledge that cannot be taught. Right now the emphasis seems to be on new college graduates especially for management positions. I have always wondered what the company will be like when we all are retired....

[itango]

Oh, gee - could it be that we old geezers have some value?

As a member of the "baby boomer" generation, having encountered age discrimination in my chosen profession, it is refreshing to find a younger person admit that we older folk might know something the young turks do not.

But I also find it interesting that it seems the young turks want to pick our brains, get our "tribal wisdom" and give us the boot! Why do you not concede that many of us "oldsters" still want to work after the "normal" retirement age, and we are motivated, ENERGETIC, intelligent, and can make significant contributions to an employer?

[Steve Jordan]

Not a big, really.

I wouldn't sweat it. As a boomer who, given the current state of this country and my financial situation, DO NOT expect or plan to retire AT ALL, I'm sure there will be plenty of boomers around well past the "historic" retirement age, as well as those who will become contractors after their jobs "retire" them and continue to contribute in the workplace. So stop talking like we're all going to die a week after we leave...

[patruga]

Great observations

You have all made excellent points. Given the new business culture that has evolved, I am not sure there will be anyone to whom the tribal wisdom can be handed off to. Remember, changing job every couple of years is now almost a requirement, so in theory, every 5 years or so a company will undergo a virtual complete change in staff; it's not happening yet, but at the rate we are going it is not that far off in the distance.

We have created a nation of leaf-hoppers whose sole purpose is to benefit themselves; not saying the leafhoppers are wrong, its just the end results of certain shortsighted business decisions. Companies are loosing human capital at an alarming rate, but hey, I am only the CEO for the next 2 - 5 years, so as long as I can keep the ship afloat for my tenure, that's what will land me the next big job.

I am pleasantly surprised that someone had the forethought to call in that old geezer to take a look see; I guess outsourcing/offshoring wouldn't meet the timeframe. Not trying to be jaded, but as a thirty-two year old I see the talent that is walking out the door.

[Too Old For IT]

Vivek Ranadive bravely assumes ...

... that management ever gave a damn. In two years there will be a house cleaning in the executive suite, and the next round of short-sighted execs. will be in place.