denotes premium content | Dec 3 2008 Feature
posted 1 May 2000 in Volume 3 Issue 8
Course
review: Benchmarking your KM intranet
Benchmarking your knowledge management intranet,
Boston, 5 - 6 April 2000
The first in a series of three
benchmarking courses in the United States this spring, the Boston event featured
presentations from Xpedior, Siemens, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Compaq. All
together, more than 20 companies were represented by the 25 delegates, and each
attended the event with very different experiences and perceptions of how a
knowledge-enabled intranet should function.
Patterson Shafer, a senior e-business
consultant with Xpedior, facilitated the opening session, which served as a
broad, highly interactive introduction to the following two days. The delegates,
from companies that included Motorola, Bank of America, Fidelity Investments,
Capital One, Honeywell and Fleet Capital discussed their expectations of the
event, as well as establishing their personal criteria for evaluating the
intranets they were about to experience. Siemens, Compaq and
PricewaterhouseCoopers are all well established in the knowledge management
arena, but that all three companies are very different is reflected in the
approach each has taken in the development of its intranet.
Siemens, one of the world's top ten
companies in electrical engineering and electronics, employs nearly 450,000
people in more than 190 countries. The company's shareholder base is almost
600,000. Knowledge management is an established component of the company's
corporate strategy, and the Siemens intranet is itself an integral part of this.
Over 150 KM projects are currently underway in the corporation, most of which
rely on intranet-based system support. Within Siemens, technology has become the
enabler and the driver of the knowledge management programme.
PricewaterhouseCoopers,
although also an extremely large organisation with 150,000 employees in 150
countries, operates in a somewhat contrasting manner. The company is a
partnership, organised by a matrix of LOS, industry specialties, and country,
and the functionality of the intranet, KnowledgeCurve, has to reflect this.
Since the merger of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand in 1998, the
company has also been in a transitional phase, and operations are currently
undergoing significant restructuring. It is therefore crucial for
PricewaterhouseCoopers employees that KnowledgeCurve is flexible enough to adapt
to these changes.
Compaq is a similarly vast organisation. As the world s second largest
computing company, and the largest global supplier of computer systems, the
corporation employs some 68,000 permanent employees in over 100 countries. The
Compaq intranet, Inline, was launched in the autumn of 1996 in an attempt to
create an infrastructure for the proliferation of information and internal sites
that existed at the time. Inline has recently undergone its third redesign, and
although there are still aspects of the system under review, user satisfaction
has been measured as being almost 80%. And just as the current version of
KnowledgeCurve was born from a company merger, the Compaq intranet has
incorporated three separate systems since its inception.
A large part of the attraction of
these benchmarking courses is that they provide a forum for delegates and
presenters alike to share their own unique experiences; effectively, over the
two days, it is not three, but more than twenty intranets that are showcased.
The aim for most participants is to learn what has worked (and what has not) for
others, and to adapt what they can to use in their own corporate strategy. This
applies to the various technologies, functions and applications demonstrated by
the presenters over the course of the event, but especially to specific issues
raised during the opening session.
An obvious concern for the delegates,
and one that was probably voiced most frequently, was to establish the value of
the systems they saw; how had the three presenting companies evaluated the
impact of their intranets? Although many of the delegates came from
organisations in which a corporate intranet had already been established, others
were just beginning their projects, and the emphasis was on them to demonstrate
to those sponsoring their efforts that the investment in time and money would
ultimately be worthwhile. Quantifying return on investment is notoriously
difficult, but each company discussed the approach they had taken.
Carole Rein,
co-host alongside Leigh Healy at PricewaterhouseCoopers, suggested that one of
the simplest indicators of an intranet's success within a company is the level
of use by employees and the growth of use over time. At Siemens, as Dirk
Ramhorst explained, the evaluation process is on-going, and forms part of the
remit of the metrics department, one of six main branches in the Siemens KM
framework. Within the company, 80% of employees have access to the intranet, of
whom some 75% use it on a daily or regular basis. Although it is almost
impossible to put a monetary value on this level of employee utilisation, Larry
Griffin, during the visit to Compaq's headquarters just outside of Boston,
presented a simple equation to illustrate the potential financial savings: If,
through enhancements to Inline, 50,000 Compaq employees saved 10 minutes a month
through having quick, direct access to the information they need, 6,000,000
minutes of productivity would be salvaged. Taking the average cost of employee
productivity per minute at 79 cents, this equates to a total saving to the
company of $4,740,000.
Influencing the culture within an organisation so that usage reaches
these levels is, however, a challenge in itself and, again, this was one of the
key areas of concern highlighted in the opening session. Siemens has developed
an incentive scheme, whereby contributions to the intranet are rewarded with
air-miles. Similarly, within many of the business units at Compaq, active
participation is expected of employees and forms part of their performance
review. But while incentive schemes can serve to attract users to a system, they
do not guarantee an employee's long-term commitment to the intranet.
At all three
of the presenting companies, though, this transition has been
successfully negotiated. While each virtual tour included a thorough explanation of
the technology on display, the most important message was that technology should
be seen purely as the enabler. Whether the intranet platform is Lotus Notes
or Microsoft based, user access has to be, in the words of Larry Griffin,
'insanely intuitive'. Compaq regularly conducts 'usability surveys' all over the
world and, while the 80% satisfaction rate is high, the intranet team have, since
the most recent redesign in October of last year, identified five priority areas
for immediate improvement. At PricewaterhouseCoopers, users are not
offered financial incentives to contribute to KnowledgeCurve, but the system
has established itself as a quick and reliable portal to company knowledge -
employees use it because it makes their jobs easier to do. At the same time,
KnowledgeCurve includes sites that do not necessarily relate to sharing best
practice, but help users save time throughout the day, for example by allowing
them to make travel reservations, access CBTs, and check Amex Statements online.
Of equal
importance in influencing the culture within an organisation, and emphasised by
each of the presenters in turn, is the degree of top-level sponsorship for an
intranet initiative. Regardless of whether a company employs a rigid knowledge
management hierarchy, led by a chief knowledge officer, as is the case at
Siemens, or instead relies on a flatter, less prescriptive structure, it is
important that those at the top offer tangible, clearly visible support to the
project. As Leigh Healy explained: 'If the company's leaders don't use your
intranet, neither will anyone else.'
The intranets presented in Boston
last month were each very different - in terms of technology, structure and
development. Siemens, Compaq and PricewaterhouseCoopers demonstrated their own
solutions to some common questions, and while neither the Siemens intranet,
KnowledgeCurve or Inline make any pretence at being perfect, each system
continues to develop. The delegates have the opportunity now to take what they
have learned, from the featured companies and also from the other
representatives over the course of the two days, and to adapt their own approach
in building an effective knowledge management intranet.
'After all the expeditions I have
led, and all the shipwrecks I've found, you might think it would get easier. But
it doesn't. Every time, fate throws the unexpected in the way. Every time, luck
and instinct play as big a role as science and technology.'Dr Robert
Ballard, oceanographer and discoverer of the Titantic
Course review written by Simon
Lelic. With thanks to Patterson Shafer, Dirk Ramhorst, Larry Griffin and Leigh
Healy.
