InformationWeek

April 26, 1999

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Sharing Knowledge
CIO Panel: Knowledge-Sharing Roundtable

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Sharing Knowledge

Editor's Note

CIO Panel

Building A Culture

Corporate Portals

The Role Of IT

In many companies, knowledge management seems to be document management. We've had a document-management system for a number of years, and the problem we still had was, if you were to type in the word "pricing" and do a search, you'd get 650 research abstracts on pricing. Since a document-management system alone didn't let us know what we knew, we embarked on an effort of trying to find, somewhere out of all of those 650 research abstracts, more about pricing.

Our initial effort had three basic thrusts. The first was making it easier for anybody in the company to know the fundamental facts about our consumer, the marketplace, product performance, those kinds of things.

The second was knowledge sharing, and we got started with an intranet and we have research forums sponsored by our research university.

The third effort was cultural. We had to figure out better ways to share what we knew and somehow make that sharing more a part of how work was done. We had to conquer the silos of information.

In our business, there are several thousand independent card-shop retailers. We know there are a lot of ideas out there--lots of retailers have tried things that have worked well and increased their store's sales. But there's no structure for them to share that.

A knowledge-creation community would hook together some of these constituencies and create a community that's focused on a business problem--in this case, growing retail sales.

We want to capture and share best practices among participants. We want to capture ideas and suggestions. We have the ability then to post ideas to the community and get quick reaction. We can actually post surveys, do online focus groups, have bulletin boards, E-mail, all that kind of connectivity in a very focused community. We view this as the new frontier moving forward.

Saint-Onge: Essentially, you can break [knowledge sharing] down into three dimensions: agility, learning, and alignment.

Learning is about understanding the trends inside and outside to the company and making meaning from those trends. Learning is also about having the capability to deal with challenges in the marketplace and shaping those communities as much as possible. Knowledge is the fuel that keeps that engine running.

We focus on alignment because we're trying to move faster, to learn new things, to do new things. But if we haven't got the mechanisms for understanding what we're all doing, we'll be working at counter-purposes.

We also refer to three components of work in building up knowledge creation. The first is building a technology infrastructure, and that has to do with connectivity--what I call building a "seamless railroad" that can carry the knowledge freight right around the organization.