InformationWeek

April 26, 1999

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

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Sharing Knowledge

Editor's Note

CIO Panel

Building A Culture

Corporate Portals

The Role Of IT

The Hackett Group, an AnswerThink company, found that the average IT professional in 1998 spent 54% of his or her time on operations, maintenance, and support, four percentage points more than in 1996. Today, the amount of time spent on infrastructure and application development has stayed about the same.

So while the visible aspects of IT's role won't look different, leading-edge technology professionals will begin a path that moves them from supporting the process to an integral part of that process.

How does one make the transition to become a business partner with users? The IT group, led by the CIO, needs to show users that they understand how knowledge management has changed user needs and that they can help business units achieve their goals.

Too often, business users believe that IT professionals, particularly the CIO, "don't get it." This usually occurs when they approach IT with a utopian goal and expect it to be carried out in two weeks for no additional cost in the IT budget.

The CIO is then in the position of having to explain why end users cannot have everything the way they want it. The challenge to IT professionals in this situation is to turn the conversation around and work with the user to understand how much of the user's desired result can be achieved with existing infrastructure.

IT's Expanding Role
For example, many case studies on knowledge management discuss "knowledge centers," or centralized places where the knowledge infrastructure resides. In many cases, this is similar to a corporate library, but for IT this structure represents the opportunity to take the high ground, embracing and evangelizing knowledge management throughout the rest of the organization.

An IT-led knowledge center would be the home of the knowledge infrastructure: the network, the servers, the data model, the knowledge model, and the overall technology structure. The IT group is then positioned to support business users with the content itself, the one piece of the knowledge infrastructure owned by the business units.

The knowledge-infrastructure specialist's role would then be incorporated into each of the existing IT jobs. The CIO would be the lead evangelist for knowledge-enabled business, structuring and managing the IT-led knowledge center. Developers would expand beyond creating application functionality into developing true applications that supports a knowledge-based process. Operations support people would support knowledge workers with the traditional call-center services but also with new knowledge-center services such as knowledge-process modeling.

IT professionals should view it as their responsibility to ensure that IT helps make knowledge-enabled processes successful. Knowledge management is changing the business environment and IT is in a prime position to help implement that change.

So, even if IT jobs today are changing more in mind-set than in practice, the mind-set change will evolve into a new way of approaching the IT function. That change also presents a golden opportunity for IT professionals to work collaboratively with their business users and become equals in the business-success equation.