Back in 1994 at Renaissance Strategy Group,* we were helping Cigna Insurance implement an early, but limited, version of process-aligned knowledge management. It was in the beginning days of KM and before the term had reached us. Working with Cigna experts, we first re-designed the underwriting process. Property casualty insurance is very knowledge-intensive (e.g. risks at movie theaters are different than those for drag racers). We then re-designed the applications that supported these processes. In this effort we turned the existing relationship of underwriters to IT on its head. They had traditionally viewed underwriting applications as an evil imposed by the central office to check up on them and to be avoided if possible. Instead, we linked application support to the new process we co-designed with the underwriters and they applauded this change. Next, we thought it would be useful to provide connections to the documented expertise on each market niche (again, think movie theaters and drag racers) as well as the identified company experts on these niche markets at each step within the process application. This concept was popular and we created a series of process focused "desktops" for underwriting, claims, and sale support that linked KM with process applications through a Visual Basic front end linked to DB2. Part way though the effort, the term “knowledge management” began to appear in the market press. So we said, “Hey, that’s what we're doing” and changed our descriptions from “performance support” to “knowledge management.”
I was later disappointed to see that some implementations of knowledge management were seen as document repositories disconnected from business processes and viewed as infrastructure support. I think this trend fostered the image of knowledge management as an esoteric concept that was difficult to determine a real value proposition. Part of the reason for this was the lack of tools to support the integration of process applications with knowledge management. Portals has helped and Ovum proposed the “workspace portal” term in the early days of the portal and we adopted the term at Accenture and also called the approach "desktops of the future" but they still required some heavy IT lifting. Now, it seems that SAP is taking its NetWeaver tool set in this process-oriented direction. I am cheering them on and look forward to seeing the results. I will explore their tool set in more detail in another posting soon.
*Renaissance has passed on but many of the alumni are working in the industry. Real Time Strategy is one example in the US, Per4m is one in the UK, and the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative carries on the BSC work.
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