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

Resistance To Sharing Knowledge
Brailsford: Middle managers who have existed to control the flow of information and knowledge to and from their people ... feel threatened as you try and open up knowledge movement across an organization. The other obstacles are cultural. Every culture as we go around the world has its own quirks.

Saint-Onge: We are organized for the industrial area and we haven't found out how we need to organize ourselves for the current state of the marketplace. I'm right in the midst of "Who owns the Internet?" And I can tell you, the knowledge guy is the upstart in that little discussion because the head of marketing is saying "I own it," the head of IT is saying "I own it," and I keep raising my hand and I say, "It's an invalid question. No one owns the Internet. It's the commons of the organization."

There has to be somebody who is the custodian of the technology and custodian of the architecture and that's IT and the knowledge team. But the current organization is systematically disabling the ability to bring knowledge to the fore.

Brailsford: To senior management, this looks and feels like chaos. Everybody is sharing. Nobody owns anything. That's a different paradigm. There's a lot of discomfort associated with that. To overcome resistance, we do small pilot tests and show they work.

Buckman: There's one other resistance that I am asked every time we're benchmarked. What's the payback? Where's the profit? I say: It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out when we move the speed of response from weeks to hours and days that there is a payback. It shifted our competitive equation. We didn't need to measure the dollar value of that. We know that's shifted our competitive equation.

Saint-Onge: When you come up with a new idea, there is always somebody saying, "How are you going to measure this?" You can keep the old crap going forever and never have to measure it.

Brailsford: This is a journey, and the ultimate arbiter will be whether you survive or not, not dollars and cents profitability. There's an inherent tension between efficiency and innovation. Current organizations have been designed for efficiency. What we're looking for in the future is innovation.

Saint-Onge: A lot of people profess to place the customer first, but in terms of what it means in everyday work, they haven't got a clue. We are so imprinted with a manufacturing approach--that is, make the widgets and dump them at the fence, and someone is going to come and pick them up.

In that world, to talk about knowledge value creation makes very little sense. It's the world of what I call "make-and-sell." We need to move to a world of "sense-and-detect." That's where knowledge makes sense. But let's say I'm a make-and-sell-type believer. So I come in there and say "We're going to do more work on knowledge." Where does that fit? First of all, I'm busy as hell. I'm in the efficiency mode and I make and sell, so I put this stuff at the fence and somebody is going to come and pick it up. What is this about? Customer knowledge belongs to a different way of doing business, which is sense-and-detect.

Brailsford: We call it the Field of Dreams marketing strategy: If you build it, they will come. It's inside-out marketing. You develop the product inside, you put it out there, and see if anybody wants it. What we're trying to do with our knowledge-creation community is turn that to outside-in--connect the constituencies as part of the process and engage them in the process.

Buckman: One other inhibitor in this whole process is some of the technology. Desktops are a perfect example. Desktops are designed for the Industrial Age. They're designed for those who come to the office at 8 and are home at 5. Your brain--and knowledge work--doesn't start at 8 and quit at 5.