Bruce McTigue speaks:
This is the first in a series of discussions with corporate knowledge executives responsible for installing, maintaining and promoting knowledge management in their organizations. Check back often to see how knowledge management is being used in businesses right now. If you're actively involved with planning or implementing knowledge management in your organization,
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Bruce McTigue is the Knowledge Asset Manager at Silicon Wireless, a Mountain View, CA start-up company with approximately 100 employees. The company develops base station equipment for cellular networks. Bruce's position falls under the jurisdiction of the Customer Service department, which also serves as Silicon Wireless' department of operations.
KMW: What you do as Silicon Wireless' Knowledge Asset Manager? What tasks take up your day?
BM: My major job functions as Knowledge Asset Manager right now are taking the company through ISO 9000 registration and development and maintenance of our corporate intranet. We do not have an external web site yet, but this will be started late this summer. The spirit of ISO ties in closely with knowledge management, because you are constantly capturing best practices by documenting your business and design processes, while making it easy to suggest changes and improvements. The ISO focus on training ensures you have a level of consistency that assures high quality.
BM: Right now I am very busy with the ISO registration process, creating flowcharts, doing training, etc. I am starting to see the benefits as managers start to adopt some of the ISO philosophy. Our company is predicting explosive growth and our systems must be under control or all hell will break loose. I also spend a good part of my day looking at new software and solutions with an eye towards introducing more Java-based applications. Our document control right now is on paper, so I am planning to computerize this as soon as we pass our ISO registration.
KMW: Does your company have a CIO or MIS director acting as your hardware systems counterpart?
BM: At this stage we do not have a CIO, but we do have an IS manager with whom I work closely. I see IS as providing the infrastucture and applications. I see my role more as figuring out how can we use this infrastructure to raise our intellectual capital. Where can we use technology to improve our processes and communications? Both roles are vital and complementary.
KMW: How do you view or interpret knowledge management in your business?
BM: I start with a very high level explanation: if we take a companies total value, subtract out all the hard assets, then what do you have? What remains has to be the company's intellectual assets. A good example of this is Microsoft, which has tremendous value, but very few hard assets. To me Knowledge Management is about managing those intellectual assets, and it's different from Information Management. Information becomes Knowledge when someone learns the information and potentially creates new information or ideas. So the Knowledge Asset Manager has to manage not only information, but also how people will learn the information and share it with others. If the value of a company is it's intellectual assets, then to raise the value of the company, you must continuously raise the intellect of the individuals. There has to a focus on continuous training and you have to find a method for capturing and distributing the knowledge of new hires and current employees.
KMW: What spurred Silicon Wireless to adopt KM in its core business strategy? Because Silicon Wireless is a start-up, I'm assuming that a Knowledge Asset Manager was in the plans from the very beginning. What problems did your company have or forsee that made a KM initiative necessary?
BM: I can't say that Silicon Wireless specifically was looking to adopt KM per say in it's core business plan. We have a very experienced executive management team that understands the importance of being prepared for our potentially phenomenal growth. They have put great emphasis on having such areas as Customer Service, Technical Support, ISO 9000 registration, and IS infrastructure ready now, not when we are focused on fulfilling customer orders. Since I have a hand in helping to develop each of these areas, especially from the technology standpoint, we came up with Knowledge Management since it can include all these areas and more. So the executive staff has supported Knowledge Management even if we did not call it that initially. As you know, you often get one chance to make a good impression, so we want to have the best service and quality right from the beginning, not work it in as an afterthought. The real impetus to do this now is it's much more difficult to start these processes the longer you wait.
KMW: How is Silicon Wireless implementing its knowledge management strategy? What other KM initiatives are being implemented or are in the planning stages?
BM: The real initiative right now is completing our ISO registration. Training is a very important part of ISO, so I will be focusing on that. I am especially interested in the different types of training available through video and computer based training. We have to train all new employees on ISO, so I want to make an ISO CBT available on our intranet.
[In addition] I was looking for something which would allow everyone in the company to contribute, something which would help us capture knowledge. Our intranet is our main method for distributing information that needs to be longer lived than information which is appropriate for email. Net-It Software's Net-it Central is my main tool for sharing information. It allows anyone in the company to contribute to the intranet without needing to know any HTML or any other kind of programming. One of the requirements for the software I was investigating was it had to be easy to maintain, because I am the only person available to do this. We are a startup company, so I am a department of 1. We have been slowly building quite a library of documentation. The number of users is rising as the company continues to hire. On a typical day, fully half the employees visit the site at least once. This is surprisingly consistent.
We are also right in the middle of implementing our ERP system, so I will working on the service side of this implementation as well as any web-enabled front ends. I want to make sure the information is available to everyone who needs it. Right now we use Seagate Software's Crystal Reports to access a variety of back end databases. This is a very quick and easy way to create reports, especially compared to the report writers which usually come with the large ERP systems. We publish Crystal straight to the intranet through Cold Fusion. Crystal also has its own Java/ActiveX/HTML client which I am experimenting with right now. We also can also lower our costs by using the intranet for anyone who just needs reports, rather than buying more client licenses.
I am slowly working on incorporating more Java into our applications where it makes sense. Since we have had Net-It Central from the beginning, everyone's systems are configured to handle Java, i.e. everyone has the latest browser releases.
KMW: How is the strategy progressing? Is the system being embraced?
BM: That's a little hard to say right now. In one sense no news is good news. With the high level of activity on the intranet, I have to believe people are finding useful information there. The effects of our ISO registration remain to be seen, but I can already see the influence on training that has spilled over.
KMW: What thoughts, ideas or advice could you give to a company looking to create a role similar to yours in their organization? To a person aspiring to be a corporate proponent of knowledge management, as a CKO or Knowledge Asset Manager? Any hidden opportunities they should look for? Any pitfalls to avoid?
BM: The company needs to be thinking ahead. Knowledge management won't necessarily produce tangible results that you can put on a spreadsheet for budgeting. I am fortunate in that ISO is very important for our business, so I have had full support for our registration and the systems to support it. In a startup company, there generally isn't going to be room in the budget for developing an intranet. In my case I had to be prepared to work on other projects while developing KM.
One nugget is KM involves the whole company, so you are exposed to everything that is going on and you have more visibility (which I suppose can be good or bad). A major gotcha is assuming that everyone (or anyone) knows how to use the applications you install. You must make sure everyone is trained adequately or your users will end frustrated and won't use the application. You also can't count on them calling you to tell you there is a problem. Even in this age of the Internet, you can't assume everyone knows how to use a browser. Along these lines, I try to use the most stable applications. Beta and tests don't go on the production intranet.