Portals and KM

2014 Global Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) is Accepting Votes

It is time to vote for the 2014 Global Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE). Your participation is critical to ensure that your leading knowledge organizations are represented in this study. Voting closes on May 31, 2014.

This award always brings back memories. The Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) award has been around for some time. Back when I was with a large consulting company and involved in our knowledge management practice, I spoke at the awards meetings in London several times.  These were the days of better travel funding and the relatively early days of KM. I am pleased that this award is still around and still relevant.

Inaugurated in 1998, the MAKE research program seeks to identify organizations (for-profit, non-profit and public sector) which are using knowledge-driven strategies to out-perform their peers in intellectual capital growth and value creation. Here is an executive summary of the 2013 Global MAKE study and here are the 2013 winners.

The electronic voting form requires a couple of minutes to complete. Simply click  on this link and vote for THREE organizations which in your view are Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises. You can also complete the nomination form by visiting the Teleos website and clicking on 'MAKE' in the left-hand navigation box and then clicking on 'MAKE Nominations'. Here is a list of the leading 2014 GLOBAL MAKE NOMINEES. By participating in this study, you automatically will receive the Executive Summary of the findings by e-mail. 

Another Enterprise 2.0 Knowledge Sharing Success Story - VistaWiki

VistaPrint is an online supplier of graphic design services and customized printed products to small businesses and consumers. I spoke with Dan Barrett, who led the implementation of their enterprise wiki for knowledge sharing, VistaWiki. Dan is a software developer but has always been interested in the intersection of technology and people. He recently published the O’Reilly book, MediaWiki.

Three years ago VistaPrint was concerned about their intranet and its inability to handle their growing knowledge sharing needs. They had plans to hire a number of recent college graduates and many of their process and practices were not documented. Dan, recognizing that knowledge management is a “people” problem more than a software problem, began the process of designing the new system independent of technology. The software development organization was chosen as the first place to implement the new system. Dan led focus groups to define the information needs and develop a taxonomy to address these requirements. Only then did they look at technology.

MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia, was selected. They started by creating over 1,000 blank wiki pages covering the complete taxonomy and related processes. This was counter to the Wikipedia advice to never provide blank pages but Dan wanted to offer a structure for employees to document knowledge. Employees now simply needed to fill in the blanks and they did not have to address structural issues. This simplified the effort and content was quickly generated.

Dan’s team monitored the content to refine it and add links. They also monitored group emails. Whenever anyone supplied content that would best fit in the wiki, this team could offer a specific home for this content within the pre-established structure of the wiki. People got the message and more content went directly into the wiki, reducing the load on email. It became very popular within software development. In the first six months they had more content than the prior intranet had managed to gather in three years.

Based on this initial popularity ten other departments lined up to have a wiki for their use. At this point, Dan advocated for an enterprise wiki rather than ten separate efforts. This enterprise effort was approved and taxonomies were developed for the rest of the organization. Dan’s team continued to monitor and refine content but the scope has called for them to recruit people in the other departments to help with this effort to keep the quality level high. When they went beyond the software developers, Dan tested business users to see it they could learn wiki mark-up language. It was not a problem.

They also created wiki extensions to further the capabilities of VistaWiki. Now you can see live data, such as sales figures, feed directly from other enterprise systems. It has become a central clearing house for all company data. Over 80% of central office employees are registered wiki users. They have created over 20,000 articles. The average number of articles per employee is 40 but there is wide variance here. There have been 175,000 page edits with over 15,000 per month.

VistaPrint employees found using the wiki format valuable for many reasons including: ease of use (based on open-source code), ability to track “live” documents and the simplicity of the design layout. I think it is great example of how to successfully implement a comprehensive enterprise wiki and a demonstration of its value.

Building a Foundation for Innovation at Sainsbury's

In 2000, Sainsbury's launched a business transformation program to move the UK supermarket chain toward a “faster, simpler, and together” approach to customer service. Jamie Oliver, the Naked Chef, was one of the main spokespersons. I was fortunate to be involved in a portal and knowledge management effort to support this transformation that began about a year later and has provided some significant results. Jamie continues as a major spokesperson and theme as evolved to “making life taste better.”

Operating within Connect, the new enterprise portal infrastructure, Sainsbury’s created a series of functionally aligned knowledge management sub-portals in such areas as product development, call centers, retail stores, supply chain, etc. The product development group served as the pilot, starting an “Idea Bank” to improve the new product development process. Each one of these functional initiatives had a business case driven by performance within the function. Connect was both the portal name and a branded concept promoting collaboration. This common infrastructure allowed for communication across the functions to better enable innovation through enhanced knowledge sharing across the enterprise.

For example, Careline is a service that allows customers to make inquiries on Sainsbury’s products, recipes, and health issues. The call center employees have increased accessed to FAQs to better answer these questions and other groups, such as senior management, have access to the call logs to better understand customer concerns to drive strategic directions. The call center reps also have access to these logs to personalize their responses to new inquiries.

This KM Review article provides more detail on how Sainsbury's used knowledge management and the new portal to reduce the time to market for new products, help employees discover new possibilities for collaboration, and allow staff to respond more flexibly to customer needs.

Aligning KM with enterprise transformation

Knowledge management can help drive enterprise transformation when it is aligned with specific business processes and their operational strategies as Tom Davenport wrote in a CIO Magazine commentary. Ryder implemented knowledge management in 2000 to support its sales force and consulting professionals as it made a transition to more knowledge intense services such as linguistics outsourcing and supply chain and logistics consulting. This transformation required a major shift in the culture and focus of the organization as it sold off its retail truck leasing and its well known yellow trucks. In fact, Ryder had to issue a disclaimer when one of the yellow Ryder trucks was on newpaper covers across the US hauling votes up to the Florida capital to be recounted in the last Presidential election. Their efforts in knowledge management continued past 2000 and the focus expanded to other business operations. Ryder received mention as one of the CIO 100 for 2002 for developing a KM center that links sales and marketing with operations and supply chain management. An article in Knowledge Management Magazine summarizes their efforts. Another summary is found here.