Although PayMaxx's initiative is intranet based and uses common knowledge-management techniques for capturing, organizing, and disseminating information, Ferdowsi thinks knowledge management is kind of a highfalutin term for what he's doing. "I call it common sense," he says. After all, what could be more sensible than taking measures that show up on the company's bottom line? "If you spend an hour solving your employees' or your customers' problem and put the solution somewhere where other people can find it, it will save the next person an hour," Ferdowsi says. "Over a year that can be thousands of man-hours and more consistent service."
Similar payoffs are achievable in companies one-tenth the size of PayMaxx. The Center for Project Management, for example, is a 10-person consulting and training company in San Ramon, Calif., that helps corporations manage large information-technology initiatives. The company is full of Mensa types who can tell the Fortune 500 how to conduct massive reengineering projects, but until very recently no one but the receptionist knew how to field phone calls.
Weaknesses like that one became apparent to president and CEO Gopal K. Kapur last year, when his staff tried to train a couple of new employees. "We were banking too much on what we remembered about the work the previous employee did and forgetting a lot of things," he says. One thing that had been lost on the mental cutting-room floor was the fact that the jobs required an ability to perform well before an audience and interact with groups. Two weeks into the training it became clear that the new employees were hopelessly uncomfortable with public speaking. Reluctantly, Kapur showed them the door.
Anxious to avoid a repeat performance, Kapur launched a project with this stated objective: to express the intuitive or unexpressed things that people know, in order to improve processes in sales, customer service, logistics management, and account and portfolio management. To ensure that employees remember as many unexpressed things as possible, the CEO decided to use what Davenport calls "a focusing mechanism"--in this case, Post-it Notes. On one recent day, for example, logistics manager Heidi Tend was trying to recollect all the steps involved in scheduling a series of training sessions at a client site. Standing before a large paper flip chart, she wrote the words "identify the client counterpart"--a reference to the person at the client site who helps organize training--on a Post-it. After affixing that note to the chart, she scribbled the name and skill level of the class on another Post-it, and on a third a reminder to "send a letter of understanding to the client," outlining fees, course duration, and contract terms.
Soon Tend's chart was awash in yellow stickies, connected flow-chart fashion by pencil lines. When she was finished, the logistics manager showed the chart to coworkers, who added their own suggestions ("check to make sure the client has received the letter of understanding," for example) on blue Post-its. With the brain dump complete and captured on paper, Tend created a digital version (the company uses both Microsoft's PowerPoint and Visio Corp.'s Visio Standard) and copied it to a "Logistics Support" folder on the network server for universal access. Kapur admits that Post-its aren't the highest-tech of solutions, but he doesn't see a good alternative. "We're in the market for a brain scanner and neural-suction device," he says. "It's a thing that sucks out what people know, stores it, and indexes it. Know anyone who sells one of those?"
A gourmet cook, Kapur likens the information-pooling exercise to creating a recipe: employees' knowledge of events, facts, and people are ingredients that must be strategically shredded, stirred, and sautÉed into something everyone in the company can eat. He encourages employees to take the initiative seriously by offering small bonuses to those who do a good job of writing down their processes--capturing not only the basic outlines but also tricks, observations, and nuances. The bonuses, says Kapur, discourage what gurus call "knowledge hoarding"--the stuff-it-under-the-mattress approach to information management.
In the next phase of the project, Kapur plans to enlist a database designer to convert all the company's "knowledge rich" documents (process related and otherwise) into an accessible format--probably a searchable database connected to a not-yet-born intranet. Employees will type in keywords (for example, "hiring trainers") and get back everything the company has learned about that subject (for example, "trainers must be comfortable speaking before audiences"). "We'll be able to codify what we know, reuse valuable information, and purge the things that become obsolete," Kapur says.
Kapur also plans to bring in what he calls a "codification expert"--actually a professional librarian--to help organize the database and develop an intranet-based "knowledge map" that will tell employees whom to call with questions too complex for a keyword search. Kapur believes that the Center for Project Management will ultimately become so expert at managing knowledge that it will be able to incorporate its techniques into its seminars and, consequently, charge more money for them.
Knowledge management is a tool for PayMaxx and the Center for Project Management, but for Minneapolis-based Teltech Resource Network it is the lifeblood. The company was founded by Joseph Shuster, a chemical engineer and entrepreneur who, in the 1970s, invented a cryogenic container for storing and transporting livestock semen samples. Realizing that similar products were already on the market and that he would have to do them one--or more than one--better, Shuster began scouring academic journals and scientific-engineering reports, and chasing down the authors of published papers to pick their brains. By refining the combined wisdom of the experts, Shuster was eventually able to build a better semen-trap. (The company he founded around that product--Minnesota Valley Engineering--remains a top manufacturer of low-temperature storage units.)
But Shuster's knowledge quest didn't end with a successful product launch. He continued to amass articles and expert contacts fueled by a new dream: to create a sophisticated, sharable giant Rolodex-like system he called "a virtual Knowledge Commons" that scientific and engineering professionals could consult for fast answers to their technical and business questions. In 1984 that knowledge commons became Teltech.
Teltech bills itself as a "nationwide knowledge-exchange system" that combines "human expertise and published content with sophisticated concept-based search-and-retrieval capabilities." Translation: it's a dating service for scientific problems and solutions. Companies pay Teltech an annual fee of $25,000 or more to act as knowledge hunter-gatherers; Teltech researchers then slog through on-line articles, patent databases, and corporate Web pages for juicy competitive and other information that its clients need to know but don't know how to get.
