Knowledge Capture and Sharing in Support of Continuous Adaptation and Innovation

Feature

posted 1 Dec 1998 in Volume 2 Issue 4

Knowledge Capture and Sharing in Support of Continuous Adaptation & Innovation

Cap Gemini knows that Knowledge Management implementation means better service for customers. Here, Gerard Hutchings, Geoff Smith and Kevan Abley show how Knowledge capture is built into key business processes to ensure that knowledge assets are always kept up to date. Push technology in the organisation makes it possible to stay on top of the massive volume of information about products, competitors, markets and clients. Key to Cap Gemini's success are Knowledge Editors. They are the focal point for capturing and maintaining best practice knowledge. Through they're vigilance and constant look out, important or relevant insights i.e. the 'best' information can be edited, disseminated, classified and shared with the right people.

A constant interchange between what we know about ourselves and what we know about our business environment is fundamental to our successCap Gemini is about Ideas, People and Technology. Our Intellectual Capital is our single biggest asset, and providing an environment to share ideas, promote original thinking and understand the rapidly changing markets we operate in, is critical to our continuing success.

Our Internal Knowledge Management (IKM) Program reflects the view that what we know is central to our thinking about yesterday's, today's and tomorrow's business activities from both an internal and external perspective. It provides a central organising theme for business change, seen as continuous adaptation and innovation - 'adaptovation' - concurrently tracking the outside world and our internal capabilities, and linking the two together.

Externally for example, we strive to maximise our knowledge of markets and competitors; we need to know who our customers are and what they think of us; we need to know what the threats from the environment are. We need to be aware of emerging trends in customer needs, in technology and in service. We need to learn from customers and suppliers.

Internally, continuously improving effectiveness is routinely expected. We also need to ensure innovation and best practice are fostered; that we encourage all our people to continuously re-examine what they do, and what they could do to create new products and services out of existing capabilities (Figure 1). The key feature of this 'adaptovation' view of continuous improvement is the integration of the knowledge we exploit to improve our external effectiveness with the knowledge that we use to address internal issues.

Figure 1. The adaptovation model

The ultimate goal is to know as much as possible about the external environment so that we can continuously improve the response to that environment internally by creating or adapting the products and service offers that we offer to our clients. At the same time, we must strive to project those products and service offers and the expertise of our employees as positively as possible to those in the external environment who might want to buy or use them.

Techniques for capturing & sharing knowledge

Effective knowledge management will not result simply by investing in technology, however advanced, easy to use or 'intelligent' it may be. Instead, we have had to consider a number of different aspects of our organisation:

Vision and strategy

What role does knowledge play in the organisation, and what do we expect to gain by making more of the knowledge we have?

Performance measurement

How do we measure the impact of our initiatives on the way we work and on the quality of our output?

Mobilisation

How do we ensure that the organisation understands and recognises the benefits of our knowledge management initiatives so that they are widely adopted?

IT

What technology is required to support the initiatives?

Content

What form do our key knowledge assets take, and how can we capture and store them, or at least make them accessible to the organisation?

Organisation design

What are the roles and responsibilities required to make our initiatives successful?

Business processes

What processes are required, impacted or enabled, by our initiatives?

Only once we had considered each of these crucial areas were we able to take our first steps down the path towards our goal of providing access to all the relevant knowledge in the organisation for anyone who needs it. Some of the initiatives which have been implemented are described below. Our efforts to date have been along three inter-related lines.

Knowledge Editors have been employed to provide a focus for knowledge capture and sharing;

Business processes have been adapted or created to ensure that vital experiences and insights are captured and maintained;

Technology has been put in place to make access to the knowledge that is captured as simple as possible.

Capturing & sharing external knowledge

Knowledge Editors are constantly looking for important or relevant insights and experiences to publish to a wider audience.

One of the cornerstones of our Knowledge program has been the appointment of Knowledge Editors. Their role is to act as a focal point for the capture, editing and dissemination of Knowledge for the Company. They take the best of external and internal information, classify this against our strategic aims, edit and abstract it, and disseminate it through the intranet.

Knowledge Editors also act as the focal point for tacit knowledge collection. This is a natural outcome of their role, since their knowledge capture responsibilities mean that they learn who the experts are for particular subject areas, and can therefore provide pointers for others searching for opinions, experience or insights. In this way the Knowledge Editors do not appear as a threat to our staff-they are not attempting to 'suck' knowledge out of our people, but instead to facilitate 'access' to experts.

Knowledge capture is built into our key business processes to ensure that our knowledge assets are always kept up to date.
Processes are critical for successful knowledge capture and sharing. Without them projects become one-off exercises, and the 'knowledge' generated quickly becomes out of date, users become dissatisfied, and the end result is that the project fails, and incurs more cost than benefits. This then makes people sceptical of knowledge management, and any further projects lack buy-in.

The processes we have implemented are event-driven, and utilise all our current business systems. For example, sales and delivery consultants continually accumulate knowledge as they read articles from newspapers and journals, and from their experiences on projects. As one of our executive board directors said: 'I always have around five articles in my briefcase that I consider critical for my own knowledge. This is an iterative process as market conditions change'.

Knowledge Editors collect these five critical articles from each member of their teams, and make them available to everybody through our intranet. As each member of the team has their own particular area of expertise, this collection of articles allows the whole team to access the collective knowledge and so promotes learning. As these assets are placed on the intranet together with contact information, this capture process also produces an 'experts' directory, allowing people to quickly identify the right person to contact to answer a particular question.

Push technology makes it possible to stay on top of the massive volume of information about products, competitors, markets and clients.

We have partnered with the FT to provide a tailored push technology news feed to our customer facing staff. This service, FT News Alert, for which Cap Gemini is a pioneer, allows real-time access to over a thousand sources Globally, including all the UK quality press. Each user can define their own intelligent agents, and also specify the delivery mechanism. This means that each person receives the information they want, delivered to their desktop with no searching.

Capturing & sharing internal knowledge

Web technology provides a single easy to use distribution channel for all internal knowledge assets.

We have an extensive intranet, and employ a document management system to capture key information, and allow quick retrieval. Because we use basic web technology in the form of browsers on desktops, all of these sources are platform independent. We have designed the Home Page to remove most of the hierarchical levels of the intranet, so when a user selects a menu option they are taken directly to information, not another menu. This has also meant that we do not need to maintain a site map as the Home Page effectively is the site map.

To further improve the ability to find the right information quickly, we are also developing 'role based' menus on the home page. As an example, for a new starter, there is an on-line induction pack. This is time-based, and has hot links to the relevant intranet pages. Thus at the end of the first month it points the user to our timesheet and expenses forms, plus the guidelines on how to complete them.

The next phase of our intranet development will be to allow users to customise the Home Page with links to sites that they use regularly in addition to links provided by the organisation.

Knowledge editors are the focal point for capturing and maintaining best practice knowledge through the creation of project profiles.

When we win a deal this triggers off the creation of a project profile. A project profile is a sales reference which is used to demonstrate our track record in an industry, or service offer, plus an internal reference to allow project staff to find who in the company has implemented a particular technology or process before. They can then share best practice and re-use lessons learned from previous projects.

We also carry out a win review, and collate proposals and presentations as demonstrations of best practice. This is controlled by the Knowledge Editors who take ownership for the collection, editing and dissemination of this knowledge.

Automated processes ensure that internal knowledge sources are either kept current or removed from the intranet.

Out of date information on an intranet is a constant problem, and causes users frustration. To overcome this problem, each page of our intranet has a defined owner, and an embedded Java script which monitors when the page was last updated. Each week an automatic search is carried out on all 28,000 pages on the intranet and the page owner is e-mailed to review their potentially out-of-date pages. If they don't modify the information or declare that it is still current, the page is removed from the intranet.

What this means for our customers

Access to external knowledge allows us to know more than our competitors, and often our clients too.

People in Cap Gemini are extremely busy, and unless new initiatives provide significant benefits and improvements in the working environment, they will not adopt them. The following quote from a Business Development Manager demonstrates that our efforts to provide access to external knowledge have enabled us to improve the quality of the services we provide to our customers:

'We are able to continuously monitor the business issues and events that are affecting our clients and to then react quickly. We are often aware of developments before our clients themselves which helps to build our reputation as being expert in their industry. The use of FT News Alert requires very little effort and training and is therefore used on a daily basis by our account development and sales teams.'

Similarly, our Knowledge Editors enable our salesforce to know as much as possible about our customers:

'While pursuing a major cross-Europe deal, the Knowledge Editor provided daily news bulletins on our prospect. We shared these bulletins with the prospect, and they were surprised how little they knew about their own organisation. This knowledge sharing gave us a real competitive advantage and contributed to the winning of the deal.'

Access to internal knowledge saves time and improves the quality of the work we do.

Responding to tender invitations and requests for proposals is a frequent activity, and preparing proposals for clients is a core skill within Cap Gemini. Our Knowledge Management initiatives have improved our ability to prepare proposals, as this statement from a global sales person demonstrates:

'Creating project profiles saves at least a man a day, probably more, on every proposal I have to put together. It also improves the content, as I would not necessarily be able to locate exactly the right references which illustrate our expertise in specific areas. The service makes our proposals look more professional and more tailored to specific customer requirements...it helps us to leverage some of the skills and collateral from the Group. Similarly the time saved can be used to focus on key sales issues rather than admin. which should improve our chances!'

In the end, Knowledge Management means a better service for our customers.

If we in Cap Gemini are to maintain our position as the largest European IT services and business consultancy company, we must work hard to adapt to and innovate for the changing business environment in which we operate. We believe that our approach to knowledge management i.e. emphasising the need for a constant interchange between what we know about our external environment and what we know about ourselves, keeps us ahead of the competition and allows us to continue to deliver the highest quality solutions and to exceed our customers expectations.

Of course we know that we cannot simply implement the systems and processes described here and then sit back and relax. Successful Knowledge Management is the result of a continuous process which examines new challenges in the markets and new opportunities for solutions. We will continue to assess new tools and techniques as they are developed, both internally and by external vendors, to ensure that we capture and share the right knowledge in the right place at the right time.

Gerard Hutchings is Principal consultant for Knowledge Management at CapGemini UK., Kevan Abley is Head of Internal Knowledge Management & Geoff Smith is Service Offer Manager for Knowledge Transition Services .at Cap Gemini UK plc.