PKF Texas: The Entrepreneur’s Playbook® - Challenges Facing Our Blended Workforce

Technology can help with the evolving workforce.

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Greg Price
Episode: 250
March 20, 2010

Summary:

As our workforce becomes more blended, issues arising from differing age, work style, distance and nationality could become a problem. Greg Price explains how technology can help you manage your knowledge systems.

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Greg: This is Greg Price with PKF Texas' Entrepreneur's Playbook. In a recent study on the Blended Workforce, I noted some challenges that lay ahead. Information technology can help people and organizations bridge the divides of age, work style, distance and nationality. IT can also enable the blended workforce to add value through improved relationships with customers, partners, and talent pools to reduce costs by identifying new efficieniencies and adding value through innovation in processes, products, and services. In this study, Microsoft suggests that information technology plays a role in the following three important areas:

Knowledge management. Enabling the retention and transfer of explicit and tacit knowledge across generations, cultures and organizational boundaries.

Mobility and virtual workforce management. Extending the capabilities and protections of the enterprise and its data resources to people, anywhere, anytime.

Collaboration and coordination. Reducing virtual distances, thereby facilitating well-managed teamwork, and bringing partners into critical processes.

In this edition of the Playbook, I will focus on only one area, Knowledge Management. Older works have knowledge gained from years of on the job experience. But companies cannot afford to keep these senior personnel on staff with escalating salaries. The development of knowledge systems and knowledge networks will become a priority. Today we use Blogs, Wikis, RSS and other tools to stay up to date. Today, I see that Facebook is allowing me to stay in touch with over a dozen communities at a time. This tool and LinkedIn are just two support tools I use daily. And finally, you need to encourage all personnel of all ages to as we say "play well with others", by encouraging and rewarding learning processes.

To read and comment on the PKF Texas' Entrepreneur's Playbook, visit my blog, fromgregshead.com. And be sure to check out the new mobile ready website PKFTexas.com. PKF Texas, - The Fit That's Right!