Hewlett-Packard is a large, successful company with over $31billion in 1995 revenues. Its fast annual revenue growthapproximately 30% from such a large base has astounded observers.The company competes in many markets, including computers andperipheral equipment, test and measurement devices, electroniccomponents, and medical devices. It has 110,000 employees and over400 locations around the world.
HP is known for its relaxed, open culture. All employees,including the CEO, work in open cubicles. Many employees aretechnically-oriented engineers who enjoy learning and sharing theirknowledge. The company is perceived as being somewhat benevolent toits employees, and fast growth has obviated the need for majorlayoffs. All employees participate in a profit sharing program.
The company is also known for its decentralized organizationalstructure and mode of operations. Business units that perform wellhave a very high degree of autonomy. There is little organizedsharing of information, resources, or employees across units. HPmanagers feel that the strong business-specific focus brought bydecentralization is a key factor in the firm's recent success.Although culturally open to sharing, few business units are willingto invest time or money in "leveraged" efforts that do not have anobvious and immediate payback for the unit. It is common, however,for employees to move from one business unit to another; thismobility makes possible some degree of informal knowledge transferwithin HP.
In mid-1995 it became apparent that several knowledge managementinitiatives were underway in various HP business units. Some hadbeen in place for several years; others were just beginning.Noticing this phenomenon, Bob Walker, HP's CIO and Vice President,and Chuck Sieloff, Manager of Information Systems Services andTechnology (ISST), decided to attempt to facilitate knowledgemanagement at HP by holding a series of workshops on the topic.Their idea was to bring together a diverse group of people withinthe company who were already doing knowledge management in someform, or who were interested in getting started. The corporate ISSTgroup had previously sponsored similar workshop initiatives in theareas of reengineering and organizational change management. Keyobjectives for the workshops included the facilitation of knowledgesharing through informal networking, and the establishment ofcommon language and management frameworks for knowledge management.Walker and Sieloff appointed Joe Schneider, an ISST staff memberwho also focused on Web-based systems, to organize theworkshops.
The first workshop was held in October of 1995. An Ernst &Young consultant facilitated the meeting, and presented someproposed definitions and frameworks. About 20 people attended thefirst session; 13 were from corporate units, and the rest fromvarious business units. Joe Schneider asked participants at themeeting if they were aware of other knowledge managementinitiatives. From this discussion Schneider compiled a list of morethan 20 HP sites where some form of proactive knowledge managementwas underway. Several of the initiatives are described below.
Trainer's Trading Post
One knowledge management initiative involves HP educators. BruceKarney is a member of the infrastructure team for the CorporateEducation organization, part of HP's Personnel function. Karneyestimates that there are more than 2,000 educators or trainersdistributed around HP, most of whom work within small groups andfind it difficult to share knowledge. About two years ago, inresponse to complaints by the education community that, "we don'tknow what's going on," Karney began work on approaches to knowledgesharing for HP educators. He hoped to make the group more of acommunity; until this effort, it had no shared history, process, ortool set.
Using Lotus Notes as the technology vehicle, Karney establishedthree different "knowledge bases" for educators to use:
Trainer's Trading Post, a discussion database on trainingtopics;
Training Library a collection of training documents (e.g., coursebinders);
Training Review, a Consumer Reports collection of evaluations oftraining resources.
Training Review never took off; educators were reluctant toopine on-line about the worth of course materials or externalproviders, and there was no reward structure for participating. Itwas therefore merged with Trainer's Trading Post. Training Librarydid receive many contributions, but as participants discovered thatthey could attach materials to submissions to Trainer's TradingPost, that knowledge base became the dominant medium for educatoruse, and Karney expects that it will be the sole offering in thefuture.
Karney adopted innovative tactics to get submissions to theknowledge bases. He gave out free Notes licenses to prospectiveusers. When a new knowledge base was established, he gave out 2000free airline miles for the first 50 readers and another 500 milesfor anyone who posted a submission. Later promotions involved milesfor contributions, for questions, and for responses to questions.By early 1996, more than two-thirds of the identified educatorcommunity had read at least one posting, and more than a third hadsubmitted a posting or comment themselves. Still, Karney wasfrustrated. Despite his countless attempts with free miles ande-mail and voice mail exhortations, he still felt the need tocontinually scare up fresh contributions. "The participationnumbers are still creeping up," he notes, "but this would havefailed without an evangelist. Even at this advanced stage, if I gotrun over by a beer truck, this database would be in trouble."
Building a Network of Experts
Another knowledge project was initiated by the library functionwithin HP Laboratories, the company's research arm. The goal ofthis project is to provide a guide to human knowledge resourceswithin the Labs and, eventually, to other parts of Hewlett-Packard.If successful, the guide will help to address a problem identifiedby a previous director of the Labs: "If only HP knew what HPknows."
The directory of HP experts, called Connex, is being developedby Tony Carrozza, an "Information Technical Engineer." He has beenworking part-time on the project for almost a year; the system isscheduled to go into its pilot phase soon. It uses a Web browser asan interface to a relational database. The primary content of thedatabase is a set of expert profiles, or guides to the backgroundsand expertise of individuals who are knowledgeable on particulartopics. By browsing or searching Connex, it will be easy to find,for example, someone in HP who speaks German, knows ISDNtechnology, and has a Masters or Ph.D. in a technical field. Uponfinding someone, the searcher can quickly link to the individualshome page if it exists.
One concern Carrozza has is how to create a manageable list ofknowledge categories in the database that will be widely understoodand will accurately reflect the Labs' broad universe of knowledge.Carrozza plans to rely on the experts themselves to furnish theiroriginal knowledge profiles and to maintain them over time. Heexpects that this will be a challenge, and speculated that expertsmight be given incentives for example, Carrozza suggested, "a DoveBar for each profile" to submit and maintain profiles. As aback-up, a "nag" feature is built into the system to remind peopleto update their profiles. Carrozza also anticipates that there maybe problems with the term "expert;" he is trying to identify lesspolitically laden terms.
Connex will be implemented originally for the Labs, but Carrozzahopes that the expert network will eventually expand throughout allof HP. He knows that other parts of the company will be developingtheir own databases, but he hopes that they will use the Connexstructure. He is already working with the Corporate Education groupdescribed above to create a network of educators using Connex. Headds, "I know other people are building expert databases. I justdon't know who they ."
Knowledge Management on Product Processes
HP's Product Processes Organization (PPO) is a corporate groupwith the mission of advancing product development and introduction.It includes such diverse functions as Corporate Quality,Procurement, Product Marketing, Safety and Environmental, andOrganizational Change. The Product Generation Information Systems(PGIS) group serves each of these functions. Bill Kay, the PPOdirector, put PGIS at the center of the PPO organization chartbecause he felt that information management needed to become a corecompetence of PPO.
As part of that competence, Kay asked Garry Gray, the manager ofPGIS, and Judy Lewis, another PGIS manager, to begin a knowledgemanagement initiative. As a "proof of concept" the PPO knowledgemanagement group developed Knowledge Links, a Web-based collectionof product development knowledge from the various PPO functions.Consistent with the philosophy of the knowledge management group,Knowledge Links contained knowledge contributed by "knowledge
reporters and editors," who obtained it through interviews withexperts. The system prototype has been used many times todemonstrate the concept of knowledge management with PPO"customers," but the goal of summarizing knowledge across PPOproved overly ambitious, and the system was never built.
The PPO knowledge management group is currently working on threeprojects. One involves competitor information for HP's Componentsgroup. The goal of the second project is to create a Web-basedinterface to primary and secondary research information. The thirdsystem manages international marketing intelligence. Each of theseprojects are being developed in a collaboration between PGIS andother PPO groups, e.g., Product Marketing and Change Management.The goal is not for PGIS to manage knowledge by itself, but ratherto facilitate the process of structuring and disseminatingknowledge through the use of information technology.
Managing Knowledge for the Computer DealerChannel
Perhaps one of the earliest initiatives to explicitly manageknowledge at HP was an effort to capture and leverage HP productknowledge for the Computer Products Organization (CPO) dealerchannel. It began in 1985. Technical support for the dealer channelhad previously involved answering phone calls; the business unitwas growing at 40% annually, and calls from dealers were growing atthe same rate. Eventually, answering all the phone calls wouldrequire all the people in Northern California. HP workers began toput frequently-asked questions on a dialup database, and the numberof dealer support calls began to decline. According to David Akers,who managed the project, the development group views each supportcall as an error.
The system came to be called HP Network News. It was convertedto Lotus Notes and has been remarkably successful in reducing thenumber of calls. One key reason for the system's effectiveness isthe developers' close attention to the actual problems faced bydealers not their own ideas about what knowledge is important.Another important factor is the constant effort by developers toadd value to the knowledge. For example, lists are constantly madeof the most frequently asked questions, frequently encounteredproblems, and most popular products. These lists are publicized anddealers are encouraged to download the information from the Notesdatabase. Less valuable information is pruned away. HP Network Newsis still going after 10 years, and it has been a significant factorin the high support ratings HP receives from its dealers.
Summary
Chuck Sieloff and Joe Schneider are committed to advancing thestate of knowledge management, but in a decentralized company likeHewlett Packard, it is not clear what steps should be taken. Theydiscuss whether there are actions they could take beyondfacilitating the Knowledge Management Workshop. They feel thatknowledge is already exchanged well within work groups and evenbusiness units, but there is little support in the culture forsharing across units. However, for ISST to try to change theculture just for the purpose of knowledge management seems like thetail wagging the dog.
Schneider and Sieloff also wonder just how different managing"knowledge" is from managing information. Many of the HPinitiatives are arguably a mixture of knowledge and information,and drawing the line between the two is difficult. Sieloff feelsthat the same fact could be either data, information, or knowledgefor different people. Of course, the various information systemsgroups at HP have a great deal of experience at managing data andinformation. How relevant is the experience gained in these areasto problems of knowledge management?
Schneider believes that facilitating knowledge management at HPcan be viewed as a knowledge management problem. The company hasboth internal expertise and external sources of knowledge onknowledge management. At the corporate level, Schneider is usingthe workshops as one mechanism to understand who needs thisknowledge and how best to transfer it. He also wants to get theworkshop participants involved in an ongoing knowledge managementnetwork that shares best practices and transfers emergingknowledge.
However, neither Chuck Sieloff nor Joe Schneider have knowledgemanagement as the only component (or in Sieloff's case, even amajor component) of their jobs. They know that other firms areestablishing permanent, full-time positions overseeing knowledgemanagement issues at the corporate level-a "Chief KnowledgeOfficer," for example. When Sieloff and Schneider discuss theconcept with regard to HP, they question whether a corporateknowledge executive would make sense in such a decentralizedcompany.
The current HP approach, which emphasizes awareness-building andthe development of common vocabulary and frameworks throughworkshops, is a subtle one. The two managers feel it is appropriatefor HP's culture, but they are always looking for other techniquesand methods that might be introduced.
Utilizing a tool similar to Cmap (free download fromhttp://cmap.ihmc.us) create a roadmap of the existing knowledgeresources at HP.
Demonstrate how the flow of knowledge could have been improvedby including a new knowledge network on your roadmap.
Yes you can use other tools
