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April 26, 1999

Sharing Knowledge
CIO Panel: Knowledge-Sharing Roundtable

To gauge the progress of knowledge management, InformationWeek went directly to users and implementers. At a roundtable discussion in New York last month, executives of three companies with efforts under way shared their insights about what they did right, what they did wrong, and what they still need to accomplish on their "journeys."

Sharing Knowledge

Editor's Note

CIO Panel

Building A Culture

Corporate Portals

The Role Of IT

o gauge the progress of knowledge management, InformationWeek went directly to users and implementors. At a roundtable discussion held in New York last month, executives of three companies with efforts under way shared their insights about what they did right, what they did wrong, and what they still need to accomplish on their "journeys."

The participants--Robert H. Buckman, CEO of Buckman Laboratories, a specialty chemicals maker in Memphis, Tenn.; Thomas W. Brailsford, manager of knowledge leadership at Hallmark Cards in Kansas City, Mo.; and Hubert Saint-Onge, senior VP of strategic capabilities at the Mutual Group, a Canadian financial services company in Waterloo, Ontario--represent different industries and goals and are at different stages in what they call their knowledge-sharing efforts. What's common is their ardent commitment and belief in the concept, and their zeal in spreading the word to others within their companies and externally. Here are some highlights from the discussion.

Buckman: Our need for sharing knowledge came very early [in the 1980s]. We ran Ph.D.s around the world to exchange information about what worked in various situations.

But we couldn't hire enough Ph.D.s and run them fast enough to meet the needs of our people on the front line or our customers [in 90 countries]. We needed to share best practices ... which were stuck behind the eyeballs and between the ears of our associates.

We also had to start dealing with all the political and cultural barriers to that process because we speak about 15 different languages. It got to be a real cultural challenge. We've had to learn what are the alternatives to command and control. How do you change your culture to share knowledge? It's not a project in our company, it's a journey that helped us move forward as an organization since 1984.

First, we asked: How do we improve the speed of response to our customers globally? It was running anywhere from two weeks to six weeks. Now, response is down into the hours or, at the most, a day or two.

Second, we have a metric: the sale of products less than five years old as a percent of total sales. It's using the sale of new designs as a measure of the speed of innovation.

As an organization, we ask: How do we take what we learned at the good-performing [divisions] and transfer that to the others? That's where we are now in the process.

Brailsford: At Hallmark Cards, we chose "knowledge leadership" as a term to reference what we're doing because knowledge management is the wrong term. It's an oxymoron. You can manage information, but you can't manage knowledge.

Knowledge, in our view, is inseparable from people and it's inseparable from work getting done. Knowledge exists at the intersection of people, work, problems to be solved, and work that needs to be done.

We got started in July 1997. We had a lot of information about the marketplace, about consumers, about product sales. The question we had was one that a lot of companies have asked themselves: What do we know?