Corporate Size and Knowledge Management

by Lisa Hauser

The Big Story

I began my career at a large, structured pharmaceutical company. Whew! What a ride.

In my position as a Product Safety Surveillance Administrator, I had a job description which I followed to the “T”. Everyone did. You only did what your job said you did. In my department (Regulatory Affairs), if you stepped outside of it, you were challenged by the person whose job you encroached on. If I dared question anything or suggested ideas for improvement, I was literally told “Thanks for bringing it to my attention, I’ll take it from here.” Then I never heard anything of the topic again or it surfaced as their idea. My department was full of knowledge hoarders. People cherished their knowledge about the industry and their positions in general.

This hoarding attitude even presented itself when we interacted with the FDA. Regulatory Affairs was responsible for reporting product and drug adverse events to the FDA, so we were audited frequently. I found that there were two attitudes towards the FDA. Most of the product managers held the view that we only should let the FDA know what they absolutely had to know. The second attitude held by one product manager (that left the position after less than a year) was that we should work with the FDA and find out how we can truly improve our products. Needless to say, the latter manager had the most successful audits. Her view of sharing information freely was a win-win situation for the company and the FDA. That’s precisely why she didn’t last long at our company. Her views didn’t mesh with the knowledge hoarding views of the rest of our department.

Davenport and Prusak in their book, Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know, state that knowledge sharing must be rewarded and encouraged. Obviously the company I worked for didn’t value this view. Thus, the attitude that the more “knowledge” employees held within themselves was valued over sharing knowledge for the improvement of the company.

In the end, what I learned most from the way this department was mismanaged was that the more knowledge is hoarded, the less productive they were able to become. It’s difficult to get beyond that “sharing for the benefit of the whole” stigma, but when you can it can be a wonderful thing.

The Small Story

Enter small company life. I began work at a small telecommunications software company four years ago. I don’t have a job description. I never had one. Therefore, I make a lot of decisions and do a lot of knowledge searching independently in order to get my work done. I do most of my learning on my own.

Early on, I learned that things were quite different from my previous company. Reading books at work to gain knowledge was encouraged and asking the seasoned employees for advice was applauded. This was something I had not experienced before.

Though I recognize inefficiencies regarding knowledge management within my current work environment, I wouldn’t dream of ever going back to my previous company.

The examples that follow pertain to my current place of employment.

Knowledge as a Corporate Asset

“In a global economy, knowledge may be a company’s greatest competitive advantage.”

From Software Products to Support Services

Davenport and Prusak state that the products produced and the practices followed that gained companies success in the past may not be practicable in the future. This is true for the telecommunications software industry. In the past we sold software products, which in themselves, may be viewed as services or intellectual property. Though our company is already in the business of selling these service products, I have seen a movement towards support services in the last four years. This falls in line with Alan Weber’s statement about the arrival of a “postindustrial” service economy. In addition to simply selling our software as products, our company has begun selling additional support services. We began with offering Tier II support for a few major Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs). We support a number of systems, servers and databases for these RBOCs, making use of the knowledge of the systems we originally sold them, but also perform general IT functions such as maintaining the data and the machines on which they reside. They are paying us for our “know-how” so that they don’t have to hire additional IT employees on their side to support the systems we already know best how to operate and maintain, thus we aren’t just bringing in revenue from the software products alone, but also from the services we now provide. We are selling our company’s knowledge.

Knowing How to Do New Things Well and Quickly

According to Davenport and Prusak, the above statement is a new variation on Sidney Winter’s explanation of an “organization that knows how to do things.” Instead of organizations simply striving to know how to do what they do, there is a need to keep one step ahead of the competition by knowing how to do new things. Along with that is knowing how to do those new things with quality and speed. Our company has begun to work this way. Our COO formed a special team to bring together the people from all three of our corporate divisions in order to share ideas, experiences and develop new products that merge the best aspects of each division. We are essentially integrating our software and hardware products, resulting in “smarter” hardware. This collaboration between divisions was the first of its kind for our company, mostly because we are quickly growing and acquiring more companies. There was a tremendous need to inventory and exchange the knowledge between the business areas. It’s exciting to see knowledge being exchanged in this way, especially because it sets the tone for the entire company that we are a knowledge sharing organization interested in growing the business by expanding on what we collectively know as a company.

Knowledge in Action

“When knowledge stops evolving it turns into opinion or dogma.”

Case of the Knowledge Hoarder

We have one particular person in our office that could be the poster child for knowledge hoarding. He’s notorious for taking control of contacts and information. Instead of sharing the name and number of a customer or vendor, he says “Oh I’ll go ahead and call them for you and take care of it.” The problem is that he hardly ever does what he says without a lot of bugging and eventual begging to make the call. I actually think he enjoys that control and having people come to him for information. However, it is just not efficient and hinders the work process. There is absolutely no reason why the manager of a project has to go ask him to call the person who they really need to talk to.

Don’t get me wrong though, he does pride himself as an “expert” and does frequently share his expertise. Though he shares his knowledge in situations where again, he takes control. He will invite himself to design meetings hemming and hawing that the project must be written with UNIX shells instead of the more secure development environments that we typically plan to use. This is an example of the statement quoted at the beginning of this section. “When knowledge stops evolving it turns into opinion or dogma.” This guy actually believes that his way is always the right way even though his technical skills are becoming outdated and he is way behind the times. When his knowledge stopped evolving and growing (when he most likely was hoarding his UNIX skills back in the day), his knowledge gradually was isolated. His experiences and ideas were never refined or examined and his only knowledge tool is now becoming obsolete. Management recognizes his hoarding and controlling practices, but prefers to write his behavior off as “That’s just Steve.”, when in fact they should be ensuring his knowledge sharing is rewarded. Perhaps they don’t act because he holds a higher position and has been with the company from the beginning. They are truly hurting themselves and the overall business process by letting him hoard.

Gaining Knowledge via Self-Discovery

It is an unspoken understanding in our office that if you don’t know how to do something, you do whatever you have to in order to gain the knowledge to accomplish the task at hand. Self-discovery in the form of informal knowledge transfer is encouraged, though it is hardly ever spoken about. I suppose it is supported by example. You will often find libraries of books in people’s offices (with people actually reading them during work hours) or impromptu meetings held around the table in the kitchen. Employees that never step foot outside the walls of their offices have blended into the background and usually stay there. Managers in our office tend to recognize the workers that actively seek out knowledge. The good news is that they reward them for it too.

Where Have All of the Mentors Gone?

If we do a good job of encouraging self-discovery, then I’d say we do an equally poor job of transferring knowledge via mentoring. We are really weak on this one. There really is no good reason behind why our office hasn’t taken advantage of mentoring. When the company first started they hired mostly Lucent, AT&T and Bell Labs early retirees. These employees took the early retirement package to jump ship when things were looking really bad for telecom a few years back (they still are bad, but that’s beside the point). Many of them really wanted to continue working until they chose to really retire. As our company grew they ended up hiring a round of young, entry-level employees. So here we are today, with very knowledgeable, seasoned UNIX engineers on one side of the office and the computer programmer graduates of the past six years knowing the latest languages on the other side. It’s old school versus new school in many ways. What’s worse is that management hasn’t even made an effort to preserve the knowledge that resides in the heads of those older employees. God forbid if one of them gets sick with a major illness or decides to retire for good. Mentoring is a perfect solution for this problem. Ideally we should be trying to transfer as much knowledge as possible onto other employees so that we don’t lose it when people retire or leave.

We’re Not Just Talking, We’re Working Here

Davenport and Prusak strongly advocate transfer of knowledge through face-to-face meetings. Overall, my company is very good at this informal method of knowledge transfer. They encourage water cooler talk, self-discovery, and other forms of generating, capturing and transferring knowledge informally. However, we currently lack the structure to fully implement a formal sharing of information within our office and across our other offices and divisions. It’s not that they don’t think it is important enough to do. It’s just that we currently don’t have the resources or budget for such a project.

Baby Steps: Building Rome One Day at a Time

Though we don’t have the ideal resources or budget to full-heartedly work toward more formal knowledge sharing, the good news is that my company has approved and encouraged me to build a knowledge portal. This is the beginning of capturing and centralizing some of our most basic knowledge. I should probably clarify that it will mostly be an information portal that will either provide the resources our employees need all in one location or point them in the right direction to obtain it. I have already planned out the architecture and developed a non-functioning prototype. My hope is that I will be able to roll this portal out in order to get our company thinking in that direction.

Realistically, I am not trying to build Rome in a day, but I want to carefully plan and initiate what I hope will be the beginning of a knowledge center. Eventually I want to create communities, linking all of our employees in all of our offices together. So, though we have a long way to go, I think we have a good start. At least this place is much better than my first company.

Work Cited

Davenport, H.Thomas, Prusak, Laurence. Working Knowledge - How Organizations Manage What They Know. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1998, 2000.