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

Brailsford: Before, you had IT for efficiency of the transaction. As we enter into this new world, what we're talking about is IT having a knowledge yield for every transaction and an understanding of how you generate that knowledge, how you give it meaning and where you put it.

Saint-Onge: The biggest thing in my organization is that we've reshaped the intranet. It was a joint venture with IT where we could say to IT: "You need to have a certain architecture for knowledge work. Let's work together to shape that."

They accepted a bit of influence on that. But they felt that they own the Internet and they wanted to shape it in their own technology image, which did not include the whole idea that an individual in the organization should be able to intuitively find exactly what he or she needs.

In the past, we had a technical approach, but when you move from information to knowledge, you have to figure out what people are doing and then fit the technology to that. It's an entirely different proposition, and the world of IT has a lot of problems fitting around that.

Brailsford: As far as our intranet is concerned, IT is essential to providing the infrastructure, but IT has to see that this is not another project--a system that is designed and then it's done. This is an evolving, ongoing infrastructure.

Saint-Onge: A recent study in the United Kingdom said that the chief knowledge officer has to be a combination of a technologist and an environmentalist. You have to understand and build the culture and understand how people act, understand relationships and then build the technology to serve that.

Current IT work being done, for instance, can't be left to those who have only technology as their prime preoccupation. It has to be architected to serve the needs of the customer and the people using it.

IT will say, Tell me what you want and I'll do it for you. So they're out there coding for the marketing person. Then somebody else wants that new product on the Internet, so they turn to that person and say, Tell me what you want and I'll do it for you. What we end up with is something that can't fit together.

Brailsford: IT is often looked at as an expense. They will rightly say it costs money to do what must be done. But what we're talking about is making IT an equal partner with the business. There may be an investment that's needed to do this. Until that's done, it's pretty tough for the IT folks to go forward and say we want to really support knowledge sharing and also be mindful that they have probably been told to control and cut costs.

Buckman: Are we willing to invest in technology to leverage knowledge so that we can redefine an organization, or are we just going to keep doing everything the same old way?

If you look at learning or education, you've got five elements of cost. One is out-of-service cost, two is travel cost to the classroom, three is the housing cost of the classroom, four is the cost of the classroom itself. And, five, you've got the cost of the professionals.