Senior Workers, Knowledge Transfer And Icts: Combining Change And Tradition.

Many SMEs are facing a difficult dilemma. Their success heavily depends on senior workers’ traditional skills and craftsmanship, but managers lack the culture and the capacity to deal with such a difficult knowledge management problem in a way that reflects the need to innovate vis-à-vis new challenges from global competition. Thus, there seems to be an unresolved tension between the enduring relevance of tradition, and the necessity to change. In this paper, we focus on how ICTs can provide help and opportunities to face such dilemma. A few selected cases and experiences derived from a European Research Project are described and commented. Overall, it is emphasized the relevance that ICTs can have in such a difficult change processes, but it also claimed that the role of technology cannot be easily understood if considered as separated from a more general interpretation of organizational processes.