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Extracts from the paper presented at the Online Collaboration Conference, Berlin, June 9th 1998 by Professor Wilf Greenwood. ( see http://www.online-work.com/presen98.htm)

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Harnessing Individual Brilliance for Team Creation
The Six C's of the Knowledge Supply Chain
By Wilf Greenwood

ABSTRACT

If a Knowledge-based organisation is to progress from islands of individual brilliance to team creation, thence to enterprise-wide creation all the way to beyond-the-enterprise creation using virtual teams, it has to support, manage and encourage each step of the knowledge creation chain.

The six-C chain from individual creation to team creation follows six steps: CREATE-CLARIFY-CLASSIFY-COMMUNICATE-COMPREHEND-CREATE where the first four steps depend largely on the individual and the last two steps depend upon teamwork.

The interface COMMUNICATE-COMPREHEND has always been difficult, as anyone involved in education knows only too well !
Major leaps in technology have in the past few years given us the tools to improve the earlier stages, the CREATE and CLASSIFY steps.

This paper shows briefly the business necessities for each of the stages and how collaboration tools such as document management, workflow, and groupware can be linked via new XML Intranet tools to provide the full knowledge armoury.

INTRODUCTION

We are all aware of Information overload:

"British office workers read, on average, 125,000 words per month (equivalent to 15 heavy novels per year) in the course of business" British Telecom survey from Aug 1997.

"We have for the first time an economy based on a key resource that is not only renewable, but self-generating.
Running out is not a problem, but drowning in it is..." (John Naisbitt "Megatrends").

Unless it can improve organisational effectiveness - and for many businesses this is shareholder value - information stays just information and never justifies promotion to the level of knowledge. We have always needed knowledge for competitive advantage. What is new suddenly, is the effect of net tools on the management of the knowledge.
If Information is the problem, knowledge management is the solution.

Knowledge management has several important aspects and I would like to concentrate on just one.

The Definition of Knowledge as far as this paper is concerned:
"Information that has a high value for a SPECIFIC organisation"

For example: a news item about a new palmtop under development probably has limited knowledge value to a telecomms company, but the fact that the CPU is a 1 volt microprocessor might be very valuable knowledge indeed.

However, it is still only possibly-relevant-information until the interpretation, context and implications have been explicitly annotated by an expert in a form that is easily-retrievable by potentially-interested colleagues.
Each of the emphasised words implies some impact on the Knowledge architecture within the chain.

THE SIX C’s OF THE KNOWLEDGE SUPPLY CHAIN

CREATE (Individual)

In organisations generally, individuals who are performing non-transactional functions, create and record that creation in a limited range of formats. Traditionally, they save their work in word processor or spreadsheet format, while in the past few years, e-mail text has joined the list. There are also a few business-specific applications, specially targeted like CAD, or specifically-written with the business in mind.

HTML has joined the pack too, but mostly as a distribution medium not a generative one. Of course the act of creating a new document is very often based on re-use of an old one, so most systems have to handle knowledge as a valid format for storage too.

The latest versions of officeware - Microsoft Office, Lotus SmartSuite and the others - are now web-enabled and lend themselves very well to easy creation. Any knowledge system worth the name has to handle them, because those formats are not going to disappear any time soon as personal productivity tools.

These officeware products betray their single-user origins though, when it comes to the level of data integrity required for team creation.

Document management systems go a long way to redressing this balance with their emphasis on the CLASSIFY stage: check-in check-out, replication, versioning, permissions and so on. But the truth is that for Knowledge Management there is a stage in-between, which I refer to as the CLARIFY stage.

CLARIFY

Clarifying a creation means to try to convert the tacit issues underlying the creation into explicit form.

This is hard to do for several reasons. One reason is that it is hard to think about metadata when doing the work - in other words: "It is difficult to think about thinking when you are busy thinking".

Most document management systems offer metadata fields at the time of input, but the range is limited and used for pure search and retrieval, rather than trying to bring out the tacit knowledge at the vital creation stage. Word processor software has metadata input fields too but with the same limitations.

Trapper

"Organisational memory is made of both hard data such as numbers, facts, figures, and rules as well as soft information such as tacit know-how, expertise, biases, experiences, anecdotes, critical incidents, lists of contacts, stories, artifacts, and details about decisions" (Morrison, 1993).

What is needed is a way of eliciting this soft tacit knowledge at the moment of creation of the hard data, between the word processor and the document management system. Trapper (Tacit Reasoning Analysis Prompter) is an advanced metadata interrogator that learns about thinking, both generally and profiled to the individual or team. Used with a state-of-the-art abstractor/summariser, Trapper can maximise the value of the metadata elicitation process. (DEMONSTRATION)

CLASSIFY

The act of classification is very usage-dependent and also dependent upon the type of tools in use for search and retrieval. When libraries get beyond a certain size, the fixed functions of classification, categorisation and cataloguing need to be able to grow flexibly. And "fixed" and "flexible" are like oil and water - difficult to mix, but not impossible.

"Hypermedia is highly successful in areas that deal with large, complex, richly connected, and cross-referenced bodies of information (Balasuramanian, 1994)".

XML-based systems combined with agents, navigation tools, query systems, and personalised pathways will provide the required flexibility.

COMMUNICATE

Grabbing an individual’s attention has become dramatically more difficult in the past few years, certainly as far as the Internet goes. Does anyone here read every piece of e-mail they receive?

In addition to the usual means of information swap - like face-to-face meetings, telephone & fax - we now have videoconferencing, shared white-boards, automated document delivery systems and workflow systems. Push and pull technology can be used to advertise our new creations - even with timed "nag" warnings if comments are not forthcoming.

COMPREHEND

Comprehend means a little more than just plain understanding. The dictionary definition includes "tolerance of divergent opinions" and that is a perfect description of one of the major benefits of hypermedia.

Turoff, Rao, and Hiltz (1991) were among the first to describe how collaborative hypermedia systems can allow teams to link large numbers of different information units in a dynamic manner.

Team members other than the originator can thus assimilate, evaluate and then add-to and link-to the individual creation. Existing groupware systems allow this in a clumsy set of attached notes (inside proprietary closed-system database formats). HTML on the World Wide Web has been the most dramatic evidence of how useful hyperlinks can be, but HTML has many data-management and presentation drawbacks.

Within the next year, the new web document types such as XML will become one of the killer app’s for Knowledge Management. XML allows annotations to be retained within the document, and those links will stay fresh, because XML uses aliases that will also permit simple centralised link management. Meaning that links that are no longer relevant can be removed easily too. Adding links and annotations together, in real time, in an open standard, is where the team collaboration intranet market is headed.

Anchor is one of the first in this family of tools we can expect to see more of. (DEMONSTRATION)

CREATION (Team)

SHARING

The truth is that individuals can be extraordinarily generous and will share astonishing amounts of valuable knowledge BUT the Intranet technology and the software - the technology and the methodology of sharing - have to be available and easy to use.

It helps enormously if the sharing goal is explicitly stated, is fixed in scope (like a project) and is perceived as worthwhile by those being asked to share.

One of the ways for the goal to be worthwhile is to be sure of receiving something valuable in return. Our own experience tells us that most knowledge has a "sell-by" date stamped on it and it is better to share it while it still has value rather than let it die away unused.

There are real-world, large-scale, practical examples of sharing that are astonishing in their scope, ingenuity and measurable success.

Case Study - CRINE (Cost Reduction In New Era)

( http://www.crine.com/ ) In the eighties, oil platform construction in the U.K. North Sea was found to be costing four to six times as much as the equivalent in the Gulf of Mexico or on the Pacific Rim.

In the early nineties, real oil prices were at a historically low level, and forecasts (since borne out) showed that this was unlikely to change in the short to medium term. However, capital expenditure and operational expenditure were rising faster than the inflation rate.

In 1992, the CRINE initiative was proposed to find ways of making UK oil field production costs more competitive. Among the main culprits causing high costs, were highly complex specifications calling for non-standard materials, equipment and procedures. The massive amount of documentation and overall certification had also grown in an uncontrolled way. Contractual verbiage, indemnities, large client project teams and unbalanced risk structures all contributed to the distrust and the adversarial nature of the business.

The CRINE report identified the root cause of the malaise as: "industry culture and business practice". In a classic phrase, the report identified "manning the mistrust" as one of the most futile cost drivers of all.

Among the remedies that were adopted, functional specifications were developed jointly between the oil companies and the suppliers, that recognise the supplier as the expert on his own equipment, especially when it comes to international standards, regulations and so on. This permits the supplier to offer as near a standard product as possible and furthermore allows him to understand what additions he can consistently add to his product range.

On a grand scale, this kind of creative partnering also led to revolutionary risk-sharing deals like the BP Andrew, where a "Gainshare" contract delineated very carefully the financial risk for both sides while showing precisely how both sides could benefit from a win-win approach.

CONCLUSION - "From hierarchies to hyperlinks…"

Very often, secrecy in business is an attempt to hide ignorance, not to hide knowledge.
As a consultant, I see this frequently when building corporate intranets. But a negative attitude to sharing information might be built in to the corporate culture right from the top. This has to be changed first, if initiatives for knowledge networking are to have any chance of success.

Getting individuals to share is much more a matter of giving them easy-to-use tools than retraining them psychologically ! To share openly, individuals need tools and top-level proactive assistance and approval. Motivation will arrive via feedback and automated feedback can help complete the knowledge loop.

Harnessing of individual brilliance is the only way to create great teams.

Teams formed under these conditions understand how organised sharing, carefully contracted partnering and creative alliancing can be driven to work in everybody's favour, beyond the limits of the organisation.

Especially if sharing is championed to the extent that it becomes second nature within the organisation.

Thank you.

References

Balasubramanian, V. 1994. Hypermedia: An applications perspective. The X Journal, May-June: 52-58.

Morrison, J. 1993. Team Memory: Information management for business teams. Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 1993, CA: IEEE Press, 122-131.

Turoff, M., Rao, U., and Hiltz, S. R. 1991. Collaborative hypertext in computer mediated communications, Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 1991, CA: IEEE Press, 24-33.

Copyright ©1997-98, Wilf Greenwood.