Management of Information & Knowledge Strategically - Essay Example

Further on, recommendations have been made such as having a knowledge management system that is comprehensive and accessed to everyone, including customers and one that has fully searchable and one that can be used to access a great deal of information by attaching multiple files. Currently, Baby Boomers are heading off into retirement. In the United States of America, Baby Boomers who were born between 1946 and 1964 and are now over 50 to 55 years of age and make up one third of the country’s workforce and they are rapidly leaving the boardroom (Foster 2005).

In Europe alone, most workers are aged between 36 and 44 years of age and this is expected to reduce by 19 per cent as most of them move into retirement (Foster 2005). And yet most American, Canadian and European firms do not have plans to manage and transfer knowledge and for this reason, there is a great risk of loss of experience and knowledge on an unprecedented scale (Thompson 2004). Ryanair does not have a comprehensive knowledge management system to manage its knowledge assets (Creaton 2007).

This poses a huge threat for the company with the current and future problems for this being the risk of reinventing the wheel in terms of innovation, lack of customer responsiveness to products, lack of knowledge on the competitors’ moves and strategy which may result to poor pricing, loss of intellectual property after employees leave with essential knowledge, poor employee relations and time wastage in training and developing workers. A knowledge management system is important in solving and avoiding these problems in a number of certain ways.

A knowledge management system comes in handy as it enhances Ryanair’s value proposition of operational excellence whereby the company focuses on creating operational efficiencies to keep costs low so as to maintain its position as a low cost airline. A knowledge management system is