Introduction

Feb 15 9:45am, I was interrupted by my outlook reminder. 10am, at Calit2, was a talk by Scott Shaffar of Northrop Grumman Corporations. The topic was Challenges in Knowledge Management - An Industry Perspective. I got to go, the keyword is ‘industry.’ It could be different from academic rant I have been hearing for a few months.

I went in slightly late, he has not started. He begins by saying how few audience were there, and shortly gave an overview of how large Northrop is. 120’000 employees, sites all over America. Even in Southern California, there were 3 sites. Overall, there were about 7-8 divisions, including submarines, fighter planes, electronics, and so forth. Now I recalled from Gloria, that there was a mentioned of correlation between spreading sites over US and influence of political bills and fundings. This makes sense.

Problems in Knowledge Management

The next part is about what their problems were. They found such a disperse localities difficult on collaboration. People were not talking beyond their locales. “They were not asking enough,” Shaffar claimed. “Why not?” I thought.

His answers were: Knowledge contents were poorly managed and there were limited abilities of searchers to find experts. There are also many types of knowledge that were hard to share, keywords: (in)‘visible’ and (in)‘accessible.’ I added the ‘in’ as an after thoughts. An interesting remark was, “It's the complexity, not that technology wasn’t there.” My mind goes again, “So information is the problem now?”

Other problems: Lack of lessons reuse, loss of knowledge through attrition (young people leaving within 3-5 years) and retirements.

In essence, according to Shaffar, there are two main sources of problems: One is people. People are not sharing. They do not want to ask questions. Two is information. Information are hard to pass on. Or is it only two? Why these two?

Solutions, or Did I hear it wrongly?

In a positive note, they developed a solution known as ‘Learning Before During and After.’ This is to encourage employees to share knowledge with each other. The technologies they invested were impressive: Video and interviews storage platforms, contents storage, talent search engine, adjusting office setups to encourage sharing, and a ‘how do I’ web service for employees to ask questions and seek answers. If you have thought of it, they have done it.

The most fascinating part begins with Shaffar mentioning that the most difficult part is “for people to use technologies, getting teams to adopt.” That is the same problem that Grudin (1988) and Orlikowski (1992) are trying to solve! For talent search to work, employees have to enter their own information into their profile. But they did not see a reason to do it. By using management ‘hammer’ (in Shaffar’s word) people begin to understand the system has to do with both staffing and DESTAFFING. It works.

So part of the success factor include what Shaffar called ‘catalysts.’ The highlight was that usage of knowledge systems is determined by ‘leadership.’ If the leader is motivated, he will go across boundaries and network with other. In fact, according to Shaffar, the “#1 catalyst is LEADERSHIP.” This strucked me like lightning.

Issues

Many things resonated.

The words of Grudin and Palen: “Large systems invariably report that strong backing by upper management is critical to success.” The modern corporation is a product of mass production. It is a structure to allow massive amount of wealth to be congregated for the purchase of expensive machineries. Its one supported by wealth sharing through mechanism of stock exchange. Is the corporation suitable for distribution of knowledge?

Clashes: the upper management mindset is clashing with how middle management and perhaps all employees. Almost every factor worth blaming were blamed, including information. Other than perhaps Lotus Notes (Orlikowski, 1992), which is in fact a right call to arms, are every technology worth the trouble to learn? There is a strong assumption in innovations adoption, which would better be kept silent, that upper management are always right. They cannot be wrong, for they are supposed to be the elites, and are paid a lot to their name.

Coming to the new millennia, employees have new rights. Half a century ago, beginning with the revolutionary concept of a ‘professional,’ work became more than actions and processes. Employees began to think. Today, this process has not stopped. We went through the phases of information economy and heading into the knowledge economy, coupled with notion of networked society. If the employees beneath the upper management are not worthy, the process will not go this far. We have came a long way, yet, the corporation has not changed much.

Structural Issues?

There is a recognition that if employees network willingly and enthusiastically with others who need their knowledge, the corporation will thrive. Yet, employees are rarely interested. Shaffar did not say why. Its just a fact. Or did he, when he portrayed simply that middle management were resistance layer?

Objectively speaking, middle management, being the bridge between upper management and employees, are the bridges within the corporation. They know the jurisdictions, and also the ground rules. They have tasks that upper management could not see, and they know the operations well enough to say not. They are often the people who had stayed in the company long enough to be important. We can assume some black sheeps but not most. We also could not, and would not assume, the upper management were all white sheeps. If people are not the problem, what is?

There are many features of a corporation, which is left over from its foundational building blocks. Designed for mass production, for employees to be paid well enough to survive, for ease of funding from the stock exchange, and for messing of wealth. Structurally, its optimized for these tasks. Yet, exchange of information is unpredictable and self-organizing. For employees looking forward to pay day and recognition of efforts from above, many questions await. They would not get blame for not passing on information, for these cannot be written in black and white. These require self-motivation. But did the corporation offer enough for them to self-organize and self-motivate?

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References
Grudin J (1988). Why CSCW applications fail: Problems in the Design and Evaluation of Organizational Interfaces. ACM.

Grudin J, and Palen L. Why Groupware Succeeds: Discretion or Mandate?

Orlikowski W (1992). Learning from notes: Organizational issues in groupware implementation. CSCW, Nov.

Feb 2008