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April 26, 1999

Sharing Knowledge
Communities Of Practice: A Culture Built On Sharing

By Susan S. Hanley

Sharing Knowledge

Editor's Note

CIO Panel

Building A Culture

Corporate Portals

The Role Of IT

nowledge management is about people and the processes they use to share information and build knowledge. At American Management Systems Inc., a business and information technology consulting firm in Fairfax, Va., we have a culture in which sharing what you know has long been the key ingredient for success. We have formalized previously informal communities, established incentives and rewards for participation, and leveraged collaborative technology to provide an infrastructure to make it all work.

Capturing our collective intellectual capital--knowledge, experience, research, and ideas--and making it accessible to client engagement teams, no matter where or when it's needed, is vital to our business success. For AMS, knowledge management is a strategic imperative.

Twenty years ago, AMS had 500 employees working with about 50 clients. When you needed to know who had done something on a project, or to get a head start on your assignment, you simply went to the coffee room to find someone who could help you. Today, we have nearly 9,000 people in more than 50 offices working on approximately 500 projects. Some client engagements involve as many as 700 consultants. AMS's revenue last year was $1.06 billion.

Obviously, we find it increasingly challenging to leverage what we have learned across the company. Recognizing this, we began a series of initiatives in 1993 to ensure that each team had access to the best of our knowledge, practices, and technology. The most recent of these initiatives are the AMS Knowledge Centers, which embody the concept of knowledge-based communities of practice. With our communities, we're trying to recreate the environment that inhabited our coffee room 20 years ago.

Each Knowledge Center is a worldwide virtual community of AMS people connected by interest and expertise in a specific discipline. Members of the communities are called Knowledge Center Associates; they communicate using Lotus Notes, which serves as our corporate intranet. AMS expert practitioners are selected as Knowledge Center Associates for their expertise in one or more of AMS's core disciplines.

Associates agree to share their knowledge in a tangible way through an annual Associates Program. Their program contribution can be a research paper, insight into a new technology or project management technique, or a report on lessons learned from a client project. Completed programs are added to our Lotus Notes knowledge repository, and are catalogued and indexed by professional reference librarians. This knowledge base can be accessed by all employees.

Real-Time Problem Solving
Knowledge Center Associates are equally committed to helping solve problems in real time. All AMS employees, not just Associates, have access to the corporate Notes groupware system and intranet links to the Knowledge Center communities.

In addition to communication through discussion databases, E-mail, and voice mail, Associates participate in conferences and other events that focus on networking and sharing new ideas, best practices, and lessons learned.

Through these knowledge communities, we can leverage every bit of expertise that AMS employees generate. We frequently share reports with clients, and we set up collaborative databases for our teams of AMS representatives and clients where we store project deliverables, track issues and action items, and conduct discussions.

Occasionally, we invite an outside expert to be a"guest" in one of our collaborative databases for a Knowledge Center community. For example, on the home page of our "Organization Development and Change Management" database, we created an area called the "OD Lounge" and invited two external experts to be the resident "lounge lizards" for two weeks.

Since 1996, when we formalized our Knowledge Centers, we've learned a lot about supporting and sustaining our knowledge-based communities. These lessons follow several basic themes:

Recognizing individual achievement
Building group identity
Motivating and rewarding participation
Celebrating successes
Delivering value

Motivating people to make contributions is a big challenge: How do you get people who are already working 10- to 12-hour days to spend "just a little more time" to write down something that might help someone else--someone who they may not know or who may never thank them?

Culture Of Assistance
Our corporate culture has really helped. We have always fostered an environment where you could walk into anyone's office to seek help. In addition, individual career successes have always been tied to leveraging knowledge.

Ultimately, we would like some measure of knowledge sharing to be built into everyone's performance objectives, not just the 10% of our consultants who are Knowledge Center Associates.

AMS's commitment to sharing and advancing its knowledge lets us deliver superior value and increase our effectiveness in serving clients, employees, and the company. Through effective use of a collaborative work environment, we can deliver the right person or the right experience at the right time.

We've been using a balanced scorecard to weigh the results of our knowledge-management initiatives. This is an evolving process, and we will continue to focus this year on improving our methods for measuring value. This is especially critical because in the workplace, just as in the world of tennis, where I spend a lot of time outside of work, if you're not keeping score, it's only practice.

Susan S. Hanley is a senior principal and director of knowledge-management initiatives at American Management Systems Inc., a business and information technology consulting firm in Fairfax, Va.