Using IT-Supported Knowledge Repositories for Succession Planning in SMEs: How to Deal with Knowledge Loss?

Introduction

The aging society will soon lead to a number of retirements in companies that cannot be compensated for by the smaller number of succeeding individuals. Even though this issue means a challenge to every company, it seems that it affects small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in particular (Commission of the European Communities, 2006). At the same time, knowledge is viewed as the key strategic resource needed to stay competitive and develop (Spender, 1996). Consequently, all companies, regardless of size, need to identify and implement systematic approaches to cope with the demographic challenge and its possible internal and external consequences with respect to the companies´ capability to take actions (Delong, 2004). One may conclude that the required knowledge management (KM) work should primarily address knowledge retention and knowledge sharing to reduce the risk of knowledge attrition (or even worse knowledge loss); the aspects of succession planning and KM are thus of strategic importance. This also means that the time has finally come to take a proactive approach to organizational knowledge (Von Krogh et al., 2001). IT-supported knowledge repositories are considered to take a key role in KM (Kankanhalli et al., 2005), and having knowledge conversion in mind (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995), they could therefore provide support in addressing the challenge outlined above.

Against this background, this chapter attempts to contribute to the body of knowledge concerning the use of IT-supported knowledge repositories in SME succession planning. Thereby the focus is on the capturing process as it presents the main component to make knowledge repositories working. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to analyse different types of knowledge loss in the capturing process from the perspective of SME succession planning in order to obtain an improved understanding of the situation which may also allow a better handling of it. To achieve the aim, the authors take advantage of their previous research activities in the areas of SME succession planning and knowledge loss.

The chapter is structured as follows. In the next section, important domains relevant to the study are introduced briefly. This is followed by a section that presents the theoretical analysis and results regarding SME succession planning and knowledge loss in the capture process. The chapter concludes in section 4, which also addresses some implications and future research directions.