The Retirement Wave Is Real, and It's Already Here
“We’ll deal with it when it happens” is not a knowledge management plan.
State agencies and local government are in the middle of a workforce shift unlike anything in recent memory. Across the country, 30 to 45 percent of agency staff are at or near retirement eligibility. Many of them have been in their roles for 20, 30, even 40 years.
That’s not just a staffing challenge. That’s a knowledge crisis in slow motion. The institutional knowledge these employees carry is not documented anywhere. It lives in their heads, their inboxes, and the informal processes they have refined over decades. When they leave, it goes with them.
If nearly half your agency’s team could retire in the next few years, your biggest risk isn’t a system outage. It’s that one day, the person who knows how everything actually works puts in their notice. Digitizing processes, documents, and institutional workflows before that happens isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s how your agency stays functional, compliant, and ready to serve the public — no matter who is in the building.
Consider what that looks like in practice. A water quality inspector retires was the only person who understood why a certain monitoring protocol was set up the way it was. A permits coordinator leaves who had personal relationships with every county office and knew exactly who to call when an application got stuck. An engineer who was the informal keeper of 15 years of project history that never made it into any official system gave notice.
This is not hypothetical. It is happening right now at agencies across the country.
When "Ask So-and-So" Is Your Knowledge Management System
If the answer to every process question is a person, you have a problem.
Here’s a quick test. Think about your five most complex or high-stakes processes. Now ask: if the person who manages each one left tomorrow, would anyone know what to do?
If the honest answer is “not really,” you are one retirement away from a significant operational gap.
Many agencies rely on what might charitably be called informal knowledge networks. Staff know who to call. They know which forms are current and which were quietly replaced two years ago. They know which systems actually talk to each other and which ones require someone to copy data from one place to another by hand.
None of that is written down. None of it is searchable. And none of it survives a retirement.
Vacancy rates at many state agencies compound the challenge. When a significant share of your engineering or program positions sit unfilled, the people who remained are already stretched. Losing institutional knowledge on top of that isn’t just inconvenient. It actively slows your agency’s ability to deliver on its mission.
When Storage Rooms Outnumber Conference Rooms
Paper storage is not a records strategy.
There is another visible symptom of an agency operating without a strong knowledge infrastructure. Take a look at how much space is consumed by paper.
In agencies that have not yet digitized their records, it is not unusual for a significant portion of office space to be dedicated entirely to storage. Filing cabinets, bankers’ boxes, off-site facilities — all holding records that are technically accessible but practically invisible, because finding anything requires knowing where to look and who to ask.
Paper records carry real risks beyond inefficiency. Documents can be lost, damaged, or destroyed. They cannot be searched. They cannot be easily reproduced for public records requests. And in the event of a fire, flood, or natural disaster, they are gone.
Older systems create data security exposure too. Technology left running on outdated infrastructure presents vulnerabilities that are difficult to patch and nearly impossible to audit. None of this reflects poorly on the people who built and maintained these systems. The problem is that the operational world has changed, and the tools haven’t kept pace.
The Highest and Best Use of Your Team
Your best people deserve better than busywork.
Here is a question worth sitting with: what are your most credentialed employees actually spending their time on?
In agencies that have not yet invested in document management and workflow automation, the answer is often surprising. Program managers search shared drives for the right version of a document. Specialists spend hours each week on tasks that exist only because the systems aren’t connected. Highly trained staff are manually re-entering data that a digital form could capture in seconds.
This is not a criticism of those employees. It is a structural problem. When talented people spend significant parts of their day on work that could be automated or eliminated, the agency loses. The public loses.
High vacancy rates make this worse. With positions unfilled, the people who are present often absorb the manual work of those who aren’t. The result is a cycle where inefficiency creates pressure, and pressure makes it harder to address the root causes.
What Good Knowledge Infrastructure Actually Looks Like
You don’t have to overhaul everything — just start somewhere.
Agencies that have successfully protected their institutional knowledge didn’t do it overnight. They didn’t begin with a fully mapped enterprise technology program, either. They started by identifying their most vulnerable processes — the ones most dependent on one person, the ones most reliant on paper, the ones most likely to break during a staff transition — and built from there.
A few practical starting points:
Digitize intake processes first. Applications, forms, and external submissions are often the highest-volume, most visible processes. They are a natural starting point for replacing paper-based workflows with digital ones.
Make records searchable. A digital document that can’t be found is nearly as useful as a paper one buried in a cabinet. Document management platforms like Laserfiche support federated search across multiple repositories, so staff can find what they need across an agency’s full records in a single search.
Capture process knowledge in workflows, not people. When a process lives inside a documented, automated workflow, it survives turnover. New staff can follow it. Supervisors can audit it. The agency can improve it over time.
Build data governance before you need it. Naming conventions, retention schedules, and access controls sound like administrative details. They are actually the foundation that makes everything else scale reliably.
The agencies that have moved furthest share one thing in common. They started with one broken process, built a win, and let the results make the case for what came next.
In Conclusion: Start Before the Wave Hits
The retirements are coming. In some agencies, they have already started. The agencies that will weather this transition well are not necessarily the ones with the most staff or the biggest budgets. They are the ones that have already moved their knowledge off people and onto systems.
Laserfiche gives government agencies a platform to digitize records, automate workflows, and build the kind of searchable, organized knowledge infrastructure that outlasts staff turnover. MCCi brings the public-sector implementation experience to make it work for your environment, your processes, and your team.