InformationWeek

April 26, 1999

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Sharing Knowledge
CIO Panel: Knowledge-Sharing Roundtable

continued...page 7 of 7

Sharing Knowledge

Editor's Note

CIO Panel

Building A Culture

Corporate Portals

The Role Of IT

Every business that wants to send people to class somewhere, whether it's in an educational institution in the company or outside the company, is faced with these costs. However, if you use technology and send the classroom to the student anytime, anywhere, then you could essentially eliminate or significantly reduce the first four elements of cost, and you can shift some of that funding to get better professors. Find the economics in education. The biggest single cost from a business standpoint is out-of-service employees or lost opportunity cost.

Saint-Onge: It's not a question of money; we spend more than enough money in IT. It's a matter of how we approach what needs to get done. It's a matter of how we best leverage that technology and how we best leverage it together with our people. And it's unlikely that the answer will come from within IT.

Brailsford: When the first Conference Board meeting was held on knowledge management, it immediately divided into two camps: the HR camp and the IT camp. And there was a small contingent who said no, the real value-added here is the convergence of the two. It doesn't belong to either one. This is about putting IT together with the business and enabling what needs to get done.

Buckman: The effort needs to involve some people who are non-techies completely. Only about 20% of an organization is techie enough to easily handle a lot of the software that's out there today unless you go to the really simple software. Then you can start taking those percentages up. And the real challenge in organizations is not the 20%; it's the other 80% that we're trying to get operational.

Brailsford: One of the lines that's blurring for us is our intranet site called Voice in the Marketplace. We have IT-approved NetObjects Fusion as the tool, but we have no Web development team. We don't have that model. We have 15 people within the research division who have all had NetObjects Fusion training who are what we call Web champions and who are all responsible for their team's page on the intranet site.

IT acts as a consultant, a facilitator. That helped us up the learning curve so that now the users themselves have the ability to maintain, update, and create content.

Saint-Onge: This is a different mentor model. If I'm accustomed to building mainframe systems, what is being described here is an anathema to everything that I've lived for.

Buckman: We went from pure mainframe systems to the power of the individual, the individual with more and more power, and that's what just blew everybody out of the water. They said: We can't control it. How do we get response time? I said don't worry about that.

Saint-Onge: About 18 months ago, I said we're going to build everything on the Internet and open up the portals completely. I can't tell you how many meetings I attended where [IT] people would argue that we shouldn't let our people on the Internet. They asked: If [employees] get on the Internet, won't they be spending their time there? Won't they be spending their time doing all sorts of irresponsible things? The phone is sitting on the desk. You could do all of those things with the phone.

Brailsford: One of the biggest struggles for IT is to give up control over all of that--build the infrastructure and then trust it.

Buckman: And a big problem for management is to learn to trust their people. We tend to build our rules as organizations for the 0.5% who do something wrong, instead of building our rules for the 98% or 99% who do stuff right. If you make that mental shift, it's amazing what windows you could open for your people.