Knowledge Everywhere

It's easy to lapse into clichés when talking about
"the future of work." But beyond the theorizing and sound bites, the
fact is that many knowledge workers telecommute regularly, spend days in the
field with clients or simply are based far from corporate headquarters. Getting
them the information they need in a timely fashion is increasingly important to
the enterprise.

"Organizations have dispersed for real and critical reasons," says
Chad Weinstein, director of knowledge management consulting for Sopheon PLC, a
Minneapolis-based professional services and software company. "It lets them
get the best talent, the best resources and close proximity to potential clients
or crucial suppliers." Along with the opportunities that come with
dispersion, a globetrotting, telecommuting workforce presents challenges in
managing and disseminating a corporation's collective knowledge.

The first of those challenges is merely getting individuals within the
company to communicate with each other wherever they are located, according to
Daniel Rasmus, vice president and KM research leader for Giga Information Group
Inc. in Aliso Viejo, Calif. "Ridiculous as it may sound, many organizations
have trouble getting people to share information who aren't on the same floor,
so adding remote workers or those in other geographical locations can prove
difficult," he says.

A related issue is providing technological, social and administrative support
for employees who work outside the corporate walls, as well as remembering to
include them in project planning and scheduling. Even though Sopheon is in the
business of counseling companies on these matters, Weinstein admits that this
challenge has been difficult for his own organization. "Every time we take
on a new client or project, I review the whole roster of consultants, which
includes those who work here in Minneapolis, those who work in our other offices
and those who work remotely," he says. "This obviously makes sense
because we get the most qualified people on the job, but I have had to
discipline myself to go through that exercise each and every time."

Then there's the technology side of the dispersion equation. Corporations
with multiple offices may have duplicate or incompatible information sources and
systems, particularly if those offices were added through acquisitions. For
example, Health Net Inc., a managed care organization based in Woodland Hills,
Calif., has offices in six states, all of which the company purchased in the
past seven years. According to Clark Schenz, senior vice president of strategic
business development, sharing information and knowledge among the various
offices has been close to impossible.

"Healthcare is ultimately a local and regional business," says
Schenz. "But that being said, it is crucial for us to strike a balance
between having a unified corporation that fosters teamwork and efficiency and
the regional content and applications you need to run the individual
units." To that end, Health Net has been involved in a massive information
technology and cultural overhaul to ensure that all business units are on the
same operational page. This process is far from easy--and far from over.Far Away But Personal

Far Away But Personal

Fortunately, cultural and technical guidelines can foster knowledge management
even in a widely dispersed company. The usual cultural basis for sharing
knowledge--a sense of community, trust and shared purpose--is especially
important when employees don't see each other face-to-face. "Employee
satisfaction is key to making a highly dispersed organization work, so you
don't want to maroon people," says Scott J. Smith, global executive for
knowledge and content management at IBM Global Services in Armonk, N.Y.
"You have to find methods for keeping people connected and for building
affinity into the company."

There are several ways to go about this. Some companies, such as
Hewlett-Packard Co., require employees to work on-site for a year or so before
being allowed to telecommute. However, other companies, or at least certain
divisions within them, don't have even so basic a policy.

For example, the oil exploration division of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of
Companies has more than 50 trainers who are part of its group leadership and
performance team. They are based out of The Hague, Netherlands (35 of them),
Houston (15) and Kuala Lampur, Malaysia (five), but they spend most of their
time traveling all over the world. Their mission is to bring together Shell
leaders for 90-day programs focused on solving business problems, such as how to
compress product cycles or develop more effective drilling techniques.

Although the group has to remain mobile, it still devotes plenty of time to
nurturing its own interpersonal and professional relationships, which in turn
improves individual members' training skills and the company's change
management efforts. According to Scott Beaty, a Shell Group knowledge manager
and change agent based in Houston, annual meetings are held where all the
trainers can share what they have learned. In addition, members strive to set
aside time to collaborate in person if they happen to be in the same geographic
location.

The principle here is obvious: If people can spend time together and bond in
person, they're likely to find it easier to work together virtually. Being
with someone for even a short time better enables you to read their reactions
and "social cues," according to Beaty. So, for example, while it may
be tough to establish rapport from a distance with someone who is naturally
reticent, meeting in person may help you to connect.

"Even a virtual team is much more effective if you can meet, even if
it's just once a year," says Beaty. "When you're face-to-face,
there's a different kind of interaction than you have with e-mail or threaded
discussion or even the telephone. You build up trust through those meetings that
lets you work together much faster after you part ways and meet again."
Beaty also notes that team members stay in touch through a Web-based knowledge
management repository, which they use to share training scripts and related
discussions.

Loose centralization

Another approach to knowledge sharing and trust building is to create loosely
organized but centralized governance structures. Health Net uses such bodies to
spearhead its current organizational transformation.

According to Schenz, five key executives are setting direction for the
enterprise, and Schenz himself heads a steering committee populated by
representatives from each Health Net office to determine which local and
regional applications are needed.

"But 80 percent of our battle has to do with people and process and
creating a culture where everyone can do their jobs on a local level while
functioning with corporate objectives in mind," says Schenz. "So
we're trying to create a centralized/decentralized approach that addresses our
particular needs."

On the cultural front, the challenge is to get all the regional offices to
think of themselves as parts of a single organization with some central
governing tenets. Bringing people together in the committee is one of the first
moves in that direction. Even though the committee works mostly virtually,
Schenz says that it at least opens the door for more communication among the
divisions.

On the technology side, Health Net is building a corporate portal using
Corporate Yahoo from Yahoo Inc. The portal is designed to provide the entire
company with access to applications that apply to everyone, including human
resources information, competitive intelligence and updates on the healthcare
market. However, the project leaders also recognize that they have to make
provisions for applications and information germane to a particular state's
legislative idiosyncrasies.
Outward-Bound TechnologyObviously, the trend toward the dispersed enterprise could not have happened
without the advances in both communications and knowledge management tools that
have come on the market since the mid-1990s. The Internet and Web-based
technologies have played a key role in both facilitating corporate dispersion
and reconnecting scattered workforces. However, making technology work
effectively to capture and distribute an organization's knowledge around the
globe requires equal measures of planning and discipline.

A good place to start is with the corporate intranet--or in many cases,
intranets. Cleaning up and streamlining intranets makes it easier for all of a
company's knowledge workers, no matter where their desks are located, to find
what they need. It's also important to ensure that every office and person has
sufficient connectivity capability.

A case in point is Yahoo of Santa Clara, Calif., which grew to more than
3,000 employees in 24 countries over the past six years. According to Jeff
Pedigo, Yahoo's chief product evangelist, the company has undergone a
stringent intranet cleansing that cut the number of intranet sites and reduced
duplicated information on the remaining sites. The company is revising its
corporate portal using its own Corporate Yahoo product. Built with the whole
company in mind, the new portal will have integrated collaboration and customer
relationship management (CRM) software from Siebel Systems Inc.

"It was really hard to find anything on the old intranet. You couldn't
even figure out what was for lunch at our corporate cafeterias," says
Pedigo. "This latest effort is designed to get everyone operating off the
same blueprint, regardless of their physical location."

As part of an intranet overhaul, it is also a good idea to review the content
available and to consider implementing a quick way for individuals to identify
experts within the company. Ideally, location shouldn't matter, but in a
global enterprise cultural customs and even language must be considered. (For
more on identifying experts, see "Prospecting for Experts" in this
issue.)

In addition, IBM's Smith recommends conducting a social network analysis (SNA).
This allows a company to identify its key figures--people to whom others go with
questions and who can point to the right resource if they themselves don't
know the answer. Another aspect of social network analysis involves finding
teachers. Someone who has good social and teaching skills as well as adequate
technical knowledge may actually be more useful than someone with a high level
of technical knowledge who is difficult to deal with. An SNA can help you to
figure out not only who has expertise in certain areas but who is skilled at
passing that knowledge on to others (see the diagram "Social Network
Analysis").

Valdis Krebs, an organizational network consultant based in Cleveland, says
that these knowledge dissemination and social networking skills are so important
for a knowledge sharing enterprise that he advocates using them in employee
evaluations.

"Typically, people have been evaluated on what they know, but what's
more important now is for individuals to have a good network of connections
around them and to be able to pass on the knowledge of their network," he
says. "In an organization that's spread out, it's critical to be able
to measure this." Krebs adds that start-ups CompanyWay Inc. and Know Inc.
are developing tools and services that will allow companies to quantify network
knowledge and consider it in employee evaluations.

Although Web conferencing may not address all of a company's distributed
workforce issues, trying out a new service or technology may prove worthwhile.
Web-based collaboration and teamware offerings are available on a subscription
basis from companies such as eRoom Technology Inc., Inovie Software Inc. and
WebEx Communications Inc. In addition, wireless software and services are
maturing enough to have at least some value as a knowledge management tool for
employees who travel frequently. Companies including Conita Technologies Inc.,
GadgetSpace Inc. and GroupServe Inc. sell tools that allow knowledge workers to
access corporate communications and collaboration tools while on the road.

"Increasingly, companies have to think about unplugging the knowledge
worker," says Giga's Rasmus. "It's about letting people get to the
information they need wherever they happen to be."

The dispersed enterprise is here to stay, so companies must face and overcome
its inherent knowledge management challenges. This shift also offers new
opportunities to those who can use their collective knowledge to outpace
competitors. If you don't allow the sun to set on knowledge, it may rise on
innovation.

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Source: destinationKM.