Knowledge Management at Hewlett Packard

Feature

posted 1 Jan 1998 in Volume 1 Issue 3

Knowledge Management at Hewlett-Packard

Andrew Gannon, Director of UK PSO, Hewlett-Packard Limited explores the lessons learnt by Hewlett-Packard about the knowledge management process so far and also a vision of some of the places knowledge management can take them in the future.

Hewlett-Packard is a leading or dominant player in various technology markets worldwide. The knowledge it generates in serving these markets is one of its most important assets and, like most forward-looking companies, Hewlett-Packard is intent on putting that asset to use in all parts of the organisation. In the Professional Services Organisation (PSO), Hewlett-Packard s fast growing consultancy practice, we see knowledge management as adding to our capabilities in various different ways, from improving efficiency in current processes to leading the company as a whole into new business areas. Improving efficiency is the everyday pre-occupation of all managers and knowledge management is certainly a powerful tool to help in this process. But we believe it is also fundamental in addressing that other, much more difficult problem, of creating new sources of value for our customers, and therefore for HP. This article is a sketch of what we have learnt about the process so far, illustrated mostly from the experience of the PSO in the UK, and also a vision of some of the places knowledge management can take us in the future.

Planet of the engineers

Every company working out how to manage knowledge has to shape its strategy within the context of its own history and culture. Among the factors that have most influenced our approach at HP are decentralisation, a focus on process and a substantial internal infrastructure.

Hewlett-Packard is a true multinational, with operations spread all around the world. The degree of local control over operations is extremely high; anyone sufficiently at home in Hewlett-Packard's culture to be able to rise to a position of significant independence is presumed to be likely to get things right without head office breathing down his neck. To rely on culture this strongly means being certain that the culture is robust; Hewlett-Packard has that certainty. The company is often cited as the leading exemplar of the shirt-sleeves engineering ethic, well suited to team work and naturally directed towards problem solving.

One aspect of this culture is a relentless focus on process; at Hewlett-Packard there is a process for everything. This is one of the factors that allowed the company quickly and successfully to adapt to the new emphasis on quality, which came in the 1980s. The problem-solving power of Hewlett-Packard's culture and its concomitant concentration on process help to explain how the company has managed to grow from a turnover of $6.4 billion to $40 billion in 13 years while increasing employment from 92,000 to 112,000 only.

Almost every one of those workers is attached to the best established and largest corporate intranets in the world. HP's intranet experience goes back 15 years or more - by the end of 1996 there were 750 internal servers all offering a variety of web based servers. Initially each server was installed just to make things easier for one department or another, but as the system grew it became apparent that it was taking on a different character - it had become a company-wide knowledge management tool spanning the entire business.

The way in which this intranet has grown clearly reflects the advantages of the company's decentralised structure; groups everywhere got enthused and turned the web into a way of helping themselves work better. Guidance at various levels helped turn these enthusiasms into something all-encompassing, and global decisions supported the change. Any knowledge management strategy in Hewlett-Packard will naturally make use of this intranet, and reflect the culture that it grew from. Ours is not an organisation where change comes only from the top - it also grows from the bottom as we see ways to make our work and our lives better.

Knowledge flows easily in a decentralised organisation but harnessing these separate flows and creating new, more powerful, insights out of this combination is one of the continued challenges of knowledge management at Hewlett-Packard.

Solving problems repeatedly

Hewlett-Packard's consultancy practice, the Professional Services Organisation, has quickly grown from being an instrument of technology sales to a more ambitious and independent role as a provider and enabler of business solutions (which may or may not include HP hardware). The idea is not to recreate the capabilities and coverage of the leading management consultancies, but to focus on particular sectors and particular types of technology; the PSO aims to become a market leader in the provision of solutions based on easy-to-use client/server computing. In the past four years the UK PSO has quadrupled turnover to $100m and doubled its workforce to around 400, of whom 130 are subcontractors.

This success has underscored the need for knowledge management as a way of avoiding undue stress and burnout. HP is in general a hard working organisation, but the PSO staff works harder than most. Since consultants are knowledge workers, better knowledge management is a key to increasing their productivity, and would be worth a considerable investment in terms of management effort just on the basis of the reduction in workload that productivity improvements could bring about. A knowledge management regime which people associate with a more effective use of their time is much more likely to succeed than one which is perceived as an added reporting layer or documentation requirement with no benefit to the worker - an addition to the workload, not a reduction.

The nature of PSO's consultancy business has influenced our approach to the knowledge management task in two ways. First, the business's relatively restricted and specialised range has allowed a focus on repeatability as a realistic goal. The consultancy sees quite similar - though clearly not identical - problems on a fairly regular basis, and so has ample opportunity to test ways of repeating its successes. Like the problems, the solutions are never exactly the same twice; but the processes which bring them about can be very much alike. The second specific aspect of the business which influences our approach is its expansion into new territory. We see knowledge management as a tool for opening up new markets in the 'knowledge space' adjacent to the consultancy's current business, new markets where we can add ever more value.

The key link between these two demands on knowledge management in PSO is the way in which knowledge management helps the consultants. The consultants are both the primary generators and primary users of the knowledge in the organisation. Every attempt to manage knowledge needs to reflect the fact that however much it may help elsewhere, the flow of knowledge begins with these people when they develop it and ends with them when they use it. It shapes their work and their lives, and that means that they need to see knowledge management as an enabler for their own personal goals.

Given the culture of HP, there is a problem here; engineers, and those suffused in an engineering culture, hate solving the same problem the same way twice. It might seem that the purpose of our knowledge management programs is to enforce them to do exactly that, setting out cookie cutter solutions from pre-defined components. And as long as the implementation of knowledge management procedures such as detailed proposal breakdowns and diagnostic processes seem to be doing that, there will be a barrier to their acceptance.

One of our greatest successes in knowledge management has been to overcome this view by creating an approach to work that encourages the consultants to see the knowledge management tools that offer repeatable solutions as aids to their own development. All our consultants want careers that progress, and knowledge management allows them the ability to move beyond their previous experience with greater speed and effectiveness than has previously been possible.

Navigating the Knowledge Space

This is where the image of the 'knowledge space' comes into its own. How you define it doesn't really matter; all that matters is that it is big and getting bigger, thanks to the efforts of the people working at its edges. How do those people get to the edges? From the middle; most people come to PSO with a smaller set of skills than the one they end up with, and often start off with more nuts-and-bolts technical knowledge. That puts them at the centre of the knowledge space, in its most well-travelled, smooth-trodden precincts.

The organisation benefits most from work at the edges of the knowledge space, both in terms of the value it adds and the new potential business it opens up. So the need is to get people from the centre to the periphery quickly and easily - in practical terms, to go from UNIX skills to networking skills to network systems management expertise to IT management. This progression fits nicely with the consultants' own goals of improving their skills and their competence. And it offers them the opportunity to solve new problems, which is their main non-financial motivator.

I see knowledge management in the PSO as the art of keeping the knowledge space smooth, well mapped, and easily travelled. This means realising that it is not enough just to know things; we must also know what we know and know how we know it. If knowledge is well managed in these ways it is easier for the consultants to travel from the centre outwards and to reach the edges where they can make the most useful contributions. The idea of constant movement has appeal on many levels and makes people more willing to document and transmit knowledge. If someone's career is static, then getting him to document his processes closely can make him feel as if he's just preparing the ground for his replacement. If people accept that they are constantly moving on, the feeling that they are helping their replacement is no bad thing. The idea is to move from what you know, to what other people know, to what nobody knows - yet.

We pave the well travelled parts of the knowledge space with well understood processes. Among the principle paving stones are assignment summaries and the detailed comparison of proposals with proposals already implemented. This last was an idea developed in the PSO's German practice, a nice example of how the centralised structure of the company allows good ideas to develop in one place and then migrate horizontally to others. Imitation with improvement is one of the aims of the knowledge management process - it's only fair that some of the knowledge management techniques should be developed in exactly the same way.

Facilitating the sideways movement of the consultants towards new areas of knowledge is helped by disaggregating the management tasks that apply to the staff. Our workers have project managers, skills managers and community managers. The project manager's task is obvious. The skills manager is a sort of guru, the deepest part of a pool of knowledge. The community manager pays you, feeds you and helps you develop your career. The community manager encourages staff to areas where there is likely to be growth. Breaking up the direct relationship between our consultants and their specific assigned accounts so that we can grow specialists in various knowledge disciplines has the effect of allowing leading-edge skills learned in one particular account to be spread throughout the knowledge space. Again, the idea is to make it easy to move towards the frontiers, rather than being tied to one task structure or skill set forever.

Exploring the already scouted but not thoroughly mapped parts of the knowledge space is something that requires the transmission of knowledge in ways for which a precise formula cannot be found. One technique for this is the creation of a relationship between a more junior staff member and a more senior one with relevant experience but no direct authority for the project in question - someone who can advise disinterestedly, and who can be approached without the fears that go with showing ignorance or even ineptitude to the boss. Mistakes generate knowledge but not career advancement, so separating the process that detects them from line management can be helpful. It can make people more risk tolerant than they might otherwise be, providing a safety net that encourages novelty without unduly risking business.

Out at the edges of the knowledge space is where things get most exciting. One of our aims at PSO is to find ways to bring the business needs of our clients - particularly anticipated needs - together with the extraordinary reserves of knowledge throughout the rest of Hewlett-Packard, especially in its laboratories. It is here, we think, that we can make the biggest difference, moving from business solutions to business transformations and the creation of new markets. By bringing new types of solution into being and leading the market in their implementation we increase both the market as a whole and our own share of it. For example, using this process we have pioneered the development of highly secure environments on the Internet, without which true electronic commerce would not be possible, and we are currently in detailed discussions with major clients regarding ideas which will essentially re-define their entire market for the next decade or so. With the market engagement that comes from the nature of consultancy, a little innovation and a great deal of replicability we can homestead more and more knowledge space while also continuing to grow along the frontiers. And what applies to PSO today will, I hope, become embedded in the culture of all Hewlett-Packard tomorrow.

Andrew Gannon is the Director of UK PSO at Hewlett-Packard Limited. He can be contacted at:

andrew_gannon@hp.com