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April 26, 1999

Sharing Knowledge
The Role Of IT: Subtle Changes Afoot For IT

Knowledge management won't radically alter daily life for IT departments today. But changes in mind-set will ease the transition later.

By Christine Ferrusi Ross

Sharing Knowledge

Editor's Note

CIO Panel

Building A Culture

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The Role Of IT

ome people expect knowledge management to drastically change every job in a company. Don't believe it. Yes, knowledge management is revolutionary--but revolutions don't cause rapid, radical changes to daily work. It's vital to distinguish between the macro change that knowledge management will bring to the organization and the micro impact it will have on people's jobs.

The invention of the printing press, for example, was revolutionary; after all, it completely altered the nature of communications from an oral tradition to a written one. Yet, the general population didn't wake up the day after the printing press was invented and find the world substantially different.

The knowledge-management revolution is similar. While it significantly changes the way executives think about their businesses, the daily impact is less volatile for a large group of employees--and especially for IT professionals, who would be hard-pressed to point to any one daily task and say that it had changed because of knowledge management.

Those closest to the effort will feel the change radically and completely. Others who are close to the action but not on the front lines will find that their jobs change significantly. Business unit leaders and line workers, by virtue of their knowledge of the company's core business, are asked to contribute that knowledge, changing their work from simply doing a job to simultaneously analyzing and reporting on that job.

Double Duty
Prior to knowledge management, VPs of manufacturing divisions might have focused simply on outward measures of productivity such as product cycle times and available-to-promise inventory. With the advent of knowledge management, these VPs became responsible for ensuring that their groups create and use a knowledge repository that improves performance. In addition to the existing metrics, the VPs will also be responsible for measurements regarding knowledge generation, capture, and reuse by the group. It won't change the ultimate goal--manufacturing products to certain specifications at certain times--but it will change the way they do their jobs and the way the VPs lead others in their groups.

Then there's the third group, made up of employees who are aware of knowledge management and perhaps actively involved and interested in it, but are not yet required to make radical changes in their work. Members of this group will find that their jobs change more in mind-set than in practice.

CFOs, for example, may find it somewhat easier to find the information they need, but aren't likely to feel significant impact on their daily responsibilities. Corporate librarians have always been in the business of collecting, cataloging, and distributing information, and knowledge management does not dramatically change what they do every day, even if it does make others in the company appreciate them more. The IT department won't feel radical change from knowledge management because knowledge management is a concept, not a technology.

Everything Becomes Technology
This situation is complicated, because any knowledge-management initiative will fail if the technology infrastructure is not there to support it. The truth is that all business concepts today at some point become technology issues.

Where do those massive knowledge repositories exist? On servers managed by IT. How does knowledge from the repository get distributed? By E-mail, intranet, and extranet--all managed by IT. Knowledge management is just a theoretical possibility without the technology infrastructure.

Despite its dependence on IT, knowledge management will not dramatically change the way IT professionals do their work day to day. The change is more in mind-set. Demonstrable results from that mind-set change will be a slow evolution. Knowledge management doesn't affect all areas in an organization equally, and IT is one area that will be relatively unaffected in the near term.