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

Many organizations are segmented by their communication systems. Some companies will have five different E-mail packages that actually prevent communication.

The second element is the knowledge architecture--placing at the everyone's fingertips the total knowledge base of the organization. In our call centers, as the customer starts speaking, a window opens up [on the PC screen] that says they're asking about tax shelters, and then the answer is found as the question has been asked. In this way, we go from three months training of a customer center rep to a week.

The third element is alignment. This is the culture of the organization. We are dealing with a system that requires a lot more collaborative skills, intent, and capability. To do that, you need a culture that fosters interdependence--a sense that everyone is creating the future of the firm through everything they're doing. Cultures based on dependency are not able to foster this kind of thing.

Buckman: Typically, we all communicate within a 40-foot radius with people. Now, instead of a telephone, we've got the ability to leap clear across organizations, time, and space. This opens up a huge opportunity to redefine what everyone can do.

The next step is for [workers] to increase their span of influence, to share thoughts with people they've never met in the organization. This is where you get into the culture change and move from the hoarding of knowledge to gain power to the sharing of knowledge to gain power. Until you can get very comfortable sharing, you have a real problem accelerating the creative process.

We're moving from the concept of command and control to trust. It's very different. How do you create trust virtually? It revolves around the individual. What connects individuals together is the network, the Internet.

Saint-Onge: The question is, how do people that are more individualistic in their viewpoint become more oriented toward sharing knowledge and collaboration? A senior partner from an accounting firm came up to me after a meeting and said, "This stuff is all about making me dispensable, isn't it?"

It really got me thinking about what needed to be done to bring people to see that by sharing knowledge they are winning--adding value to them and in fact, to the whole enterprise.

Brailsford: Knowledge has no value until it moves. If you keep what you've got and I keep what I've got, no value is created. The interesting thing about knowledge is that if I share what I know with you, I still own it. But now you own it, too, and it has grown in value.

A young Harvard MBA joined Hallmark recently. I've been there 25 years; she was brand new. For three months, my job was to get her grounded in the consumer. How quickly could she know what I knew? What mechanisms, what structures were in place to quickly bring her up to speed?

In the old culture, you give them some manuals, you put them in their cubicle, and three months later they come up for air. You can't do that any more. You need these people online helping out immediately. I had three months to make her as smart as I was. We have a little saying on our team: "Nobody is as smart as everybody."