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Defining The Business Value Of Technology
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April 5, 1999
Knowledge Management:Get Smart
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Internet technologies give Schneider Automation, a manufacturer of industrial automation-control equipment, a platform for easy information access. Schneider built an extranet on top of Lotus Notes/Domino that is accessed via Web browser by the company's own employees and by the sales force it shares with its parent company, Schneider Electric in Paris.
Schneider Automation is in the process of pulling into a repository all the information needed for business development and technical support, says John McElfresh, director of electronic business with the North Andover, Mass., company. "It has strong workflow capabilities to guarantee that the information never goes out of date and is accurate," says McElfresh. Each piece of information, whether it's a PowerPoint presentation or technical document, has an expiration date and a responsible party that "owns" the data.
Schneider Automation has also built links between its SAP R/3 applications and Domino. Operational data such as product availability is fed into the knowledge-management system in batch transfers. Now the company is turning those links into data feeds on the extranet. "If someone wants to know the relative availability of a product, they can find that online and it's up-to-date," McElfresh says.
The company has also integrated help-desk software from Vantive Corp. with the Domino-based repository to manage technical support and marketing information. If an employee can't find the information he or she needs from the repository, the help-desk software lets the employee create a trouble ticket that is passed to an internal department called Customer Central. There, personnel are chartered with getting an answer to any query within two days--although the process often is completed within four hours, says McElfresh. Once the answer is found, it's put into the knowledge base.Hallmark is about to launch what it calls a "knowledge-creation community" on a Web site that will be accessible to about 100 of the card company's retail stores. The site, based on a modified version of Pensare Inc.'s Knowledge Community software, will be a place where the retailers can communicate with Hallmark, exchange E-mail with each other, chat, share ideas on a bulletin board, and access a database of best practices.
Hallmark expects the site to be a fertile ground for information sharing among the retailers, as well as serving a supporting role in its own product development. "We know lots of our retailers have tried new things to increase sales, but there hasn't been a way to share those practices," says Brailsford.
First Steps
Many other companies have their own aspirations for knowledge management, but, like Hallmark, Schneider, and Sears, they are in the early stages of entering this new world of information sharing.
A growing number of technology options promise to make the effort more manageable, but even vendors agree that not all of the pieces are in place. "This topic isn't fully baked," admits Scott Smith, managing principal of Global Knowledge Management Consulting Services at IBM Global Services. "We still have a lot of things to figure out."
Businesses still rely largely on their own ability to integrate different types of software together, Smith says. For instance, they may start with a collaborative engine such as Lotus Notes and then integrate text-mining tools, interactive meeting software, and portals to integrate external data. IBM and Lotus have aggressive plans to change this building-block approach to knowledge management. "Within the next 12 months, you will see these components share the same underlying technology so that companies can share information better," Smith says.
Those kinds of promises ring hollow among skeptics who feel the whole concept has been oversold. "Knowledge management is to the late 1990s what reengineering was to the early 1990s," says Ron Shevlin, an analyst with Forrester Research. "It's a management fad perpetrated by consultants and software vendors."
That's an extreme view, but its certainly true that most businesses have a long way to go in realizing the full benefits of a comprehensive knowledge-management strategy. Many companies lack formal policies for capturing and sharing tacit information, and the overlap of technical and cultural issues makes knowledge management a complex undertaking. "It isn't rocket science," says Platinum Technology's Shimkus, "but it is difficult."
Actually, an effective knowledge-management environment would theoretically help engineers build better rockets, faster. In that respect, the two concepts might be equally ambitious--and difficult.
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Illustration by Jose Ortega
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