`Do It Yourself' is Out and Teamwork is Back in Today's Workplace, Xerox Expert Says; New Way of Looking at Work Can Help Enterprises Jump-Start Productivity.

Business & Technology Editors

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 14, 2002

The "do-it-yourself" era is over and teamwork is back in today's workplace, according to knowledge-sharing experts and a recent survey of office workers by Xerox Corporation (XRX: NYSE) and Harris Interactive.

Almost half of office workers questioned in a recent U.S. survey say collaboration with co-workers has increased substantially over the past year, and 75 percent believe there will be a greater focus on teamwork and collaboration in the future.

Building on those findings, Dan Holtshouse, Xerox's director of knowledge initiatives, shared new ways to leverage employee knowledge across the enterprise in a keynote speech here today at the Knowledge Management Europe 2002 conference.

Instilling a culture where employees can "borrow" from work already done can make everyone more efficient, said Holtshouse who proposed a multi-dimensional framework for the new workplace. "The hard reality is that the world we are living in is moving at much too fast a pace to allow repeated reinvention," he pointed out. "When you view the workplace in four dimensions - physical, organizational, informational and personal - instead of looking at it as a monolithic entity, you gain a powerful new way to spread the knowledge of individual employees and boost productivity at the same time."

As an example, Holtshouse cited a Xerox program called "CodeX," promoting the reuse of software code that was cascaded from the physical dimension into other dimensions of the workplace. Before it was instituted, the physical considerations of programmers' working at individual workstations in multiple locations discouraged sharing.

To solve the problem, Xerox established a Web portal for posting and searching for code, using the informational dimension of the workplace. A CodeX champion, working on the personal dimensions of the problem, helped change the culture of software secrecy. CodeX now has more than 1,000 developers sharing code on more than 100 projects, and 10 million lines of code are available for reuse throughout the enterprise.

Holtshouse noted that knowledge is continually being generated, captured and exploited in physical, organizational, informational and personal ways. But it is often trapped in one dimension by bottlenecks that hinder collaboration and sharing. An enterprise that removes those bottlenecks can create an environment where the best and brightest employees are retained and where knowledge can be used to raise the value of work in every corner of the organization, from service to product design.

Results from the Xerox/Harris Interactive survey on workplace productivity confirm that raising the value of their work is a concern to employees, too. Seven out of ten office workers surveyed say generating higher quality work or innovating/finding better ways to work is an important way they can add value.

As part of its business strategy, Xerox is focusing on helping companies transform work processes through a range of technologies and services, including improved document, content and knowledge management.

For more information on Xerox's knowledge programs, visit www.xerox.com/global services.

NOTE TO EDITORS: More information on the Xerox/Harris Interactive online survey: Results are based on a nationwide survey of more than 450 office workers by Harris Interactive, a global market research and consulting firm based in Rochester, N.Y. The random survey has an estimated statistical precision of +/- 5 percentage points.

For more information on Xerox, visit www.xerox.com/news. XEROX(R), The Document Company(R) and the digital X(R) are trademarks of XEROX CORPORATION.