What do you know?

The knowledge worker and the knowledge environment today require synergy and collaboration more than ever before.

It is immeasurable, intangible and yet clearly invaluable. The collective knowledge that is the sum of what every employee in a company knows, and what other information that company has accumulated over the years, has yet to find its place on the balance sheet. But even as companies acknowledge the difficulty -- or some might say the impossibility -- of quantifying knowledge, the importance of putting in place a system that can effectively capture and disseminate an organization's body of knowledge has, over the last several years, become corporate dogma. Recognizing the value of what you know is no longer sufficient. Today, companies are told, you have to know what you know, and continually learn from it.

"Knowledge management is a differentiating factor for companies today, providing the difference between being competitive and just doing business," says Howard Deane, national director of knowledge management at KMPG. "It's all about leveraging information. Too often, what happens is people recreate information when what they should be doing is determining if something has been done before and taking that information and using it or making it better."

The Gartner Group estimates that by 2003, more than half of the Fortune 1000 companies will implement a knowledge management system. The knowledge management industry itself is in the midst of a boom. In 1999, according to International Data Corporation (IDC), consultants billed $1.8 billion US for knowledge management services. That number is expected to skyrocket to more than $12 billion by 2003.

There are a number of factors driving this movement. The increasingly global nature of business, and its unrelenting pace, underline the need for a framework that allows information to be shared quickly across great distances. After all, why make your people in Frankfurt go back to the drawing board when their counterparts in New York have already solved the same problem?

"In an organization that operates globally, it's important that you share among the appropriate people whatever is going on as you know it in the organization," says Ray Darke, a CMA, FCMA and managing director of strategic planning and marketing for Scotia Capital. "For instance, a manager in Chicago may find it useful to know what attitudes towards certain initiatives are in the Caribbean."

Corporate downsizing and restructuring, and the anticipated mass exodus of retiring baby boomers, are also making employers realize the importance of capturing and retaining employees' knowledge -- even after those experienced employees are gone. Mentoring programs certainly accomplish this, but to a limited degree. The departing employee's knowledge is passed on to only one person, and the effectiveness of mentoring hinges on how much information the succeeding employee can retain and apply on the job. And when the time comes to again pass the torch, more information is likely to be lost in the relay, resulting in a loss of depth in the company's knowledge pool.

"When somebody retires, the vacuum that employee leaves behind cannot be filled adequately by a new employee, even if that individual is very capable," says Dr. George Gekas, a CMA and associate professor of business administration at Algoma University College in Sault Ste. Marie. "And now that employers are cutting positions across departments, we are moving back to the general approach that people be knowledgeable on a global, comprehensive level, as opposed to specialization. Employees are now working more collaboratively and gone are the days of 'that's not my department, cannot get involved.' The knowledge worker and the knowledge environment require synergy and collaboration more than ever."

The passage of the Information Age into what is now the "Age of Information Overload" further encourages this knowledge environment. With so much content literally at our fingertips, companies today are faced with the challenge of taking that glut of information, distilling it and turning it into something more valuable: content within an organizational context. As an IDC white paper puts it: "Instead of being smarter about information, we need information to be smarter about us."

While the phrase is relatively new, the idea behind knowledge management isn't. In fact, it has always been around in one form or another. Think of Monday morning meetings where everyone is brought up to speed on what everyone else is doing, or the procedural manual a longtime employee has finally found the time to write. But with the introduction of the computer into the workplace, and the subsequent emergence of databases, private networks and - the biggest network of all - the Internet, knowledge management has assumed more sweeping proportions and taken on a few interesting twists.

At the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board of Ontario, technology - IBM's Lotus Notes/Domino to be exact - has provided the tools with which to build an effective knowledge management system. Referred to internally as ASK, an acronym for Ask Seek Knock, the board's system includes repositories of best practices, company policies, links to subject experts, and chat rooms for live, online collaboration. Employees can access these repositories, which are all interlinked, through an Intranet portal. A querying mechanism allows searches by topic.

"For example, you could type in as a topic 'cost/benefit analysis' and this would bring up guidelines of a good cost/benefit analysis and an example of a good cost/benefit analysis," explains Ash Sooknanan, WSIB's knowledge manager. "It would also identify the experts in this area, and even give you a list of questions you might want to ask the expert."

Since it was first created in 1994, ASK has grown from 16 repositories to more than 200 today. And over the years, says Sooknanan, the system's content has become richer, with information that, in the past, employees would have had to spend time hunting around for. Because the WSTB has a strong mandate to share knowledge, even the unlikeliest piece of information ends up in ASK. "For example," says Sooknanan, "you go to the photocopier and it doesn't work and John at the next desk says 'you just bang it twice and it will work.' Now you don't usually document that, but with knowledge management, it's exactly the kind of thing you would document - small things that save time, that show you how everyday things work."

One of the challenges of knowledge management is how to get at "tacit" knowledge - undocumented information that exists in an employee's head. Claudine Simard, Lotus Canada's national technology manager, says certain components of Lotus Notes/Domino address that challenge by enabling spontaneous exchanges of information. One component, called Same Time, lets users know if any members of their group are online at any given time. So you could be reading a document, either off the Web or the company Intranet, and if someone from your team happens to log on and goes to the same site you're in, you could conceivably use this virtual crossing of paths as a springboard for a spur-of-the-moment, online discussion.

To support this online discussion, Lotus Notes/Domino has online "meeting centres" - essentially chat rooms that have been enhanced to allow for sharing of documents, and from which discussions can be "harvested" and saved into a repository.

The latter component is something that is frequently used at WSIB, says Sooknanan, and with sometimes surprising results. He recalls an online meeting between certain WSIB employees where, just as the group was about to arrive at a decision, an uninvited employee "butted in" with what turned out to be crucial information. A perfect example, says Sooknanan, of how the right knowledge management system can draw out tacit knowledge.

"Somebody who was not at the meeting and had not been asked to the meeting actually logged on and just told us we couldn't really make a decision until we contacted this division first because they were in the middle of making certain changes," recalls Sooknanan. "It was actually information that was important for us to know but that we had no way of knowing at the time."

In their search for tacit knowledge, some companies have begun mining an unexpected, and some might say a questionable, source. Tacit Knowledge Systems Corp., located in Palo Alto, Calif., has designed a software system called KnowledgeMail which, in essence, sends out electronic spiders to crawl through e-mail messages, picking out keywords and then using these keywords to build employee profiles. Let's say John Smith were to e-mail a bar code manufacturer about its latest line of scanners.

KnowledgeMail would pick out the words "bar codes" and "scanners" and add them to Smith's "private" profile. Smith can then decide whether or not he wants these categories included in his "public" profile, that is, the profile that is actually posted for other employees to see. KnowledgeMail categorizes e-mail content, but it does not archive them. Its main purpose is to identify who knows what within a company.

"We try to characterize you based on watching what you do," says David Gilmour, president and CEO of Tacit Knowledge Systems. "By looking at your e-mail and possibly your interaction with other portal systems, we can make inferences on what's important to you."

Presumably, John Smith would base his decision on whether or not he actually knows something about bar codes and scanners, and whether or not he wants his knowledge about these subjects made public. But even if he decides to keep this information in his private profile, his knowledge of bar codes and scanners would not necessarily go to waste. The next time the system receives a query on bar codes and scanners, KnowledgeMail will send Smith an e-mail telling him about the query and asking if he can be identified as a source. Smith can then contact the person who has made the query, without letting everyone else in the company know about his expertise in this area.

Another thing that KnowledgeMail does is help users build a community of practice -- one of the principles of knowledge management. While John Smith is drafting his email on bar codes and scanners, KnowledgeMail is busy searching the system for individuals with similar or related keywords.

"So with our system, you can be writing that e-mail and when you push a button we will, on the fly, analyze your draft before you send it, intersect with the profiles of your entire organization and rank people according to how appropriate they are in relation to your e-mail," says Gilmour. "What we've done is convert e-mail from an old-fashioned mail tube into something that's aware of the message you're sending and is also aware of which people are relevant to your message."

If the thought of electronic spiders crawling through your e-mail makes you arachnophobic, don't worry -- you're not alone and Gilmour knows it. That's why he built a lock box feature into KnowledgeMail that gives employees exclusive access and control over their own information -- the employer cannot get into this locked area.

"In essence, everything we learn about you is produced in a private profile that lives on an enterprise server that is in an encrypted form available to you, but not available to the company," says Gilmour. "We realized from the get go that knowledge is inescapably personal, even though employees basically have no privacy rights whatsoever on e-mail in the workplace. But we felt that our goal was not legality, it was user comfort and user support."

User comfort was the main consideration at Change Labs International. The Greenwich Conn.-based company has developed a system that uses a storyboarding approach that builds on plots and subplots. Gerald Ross, Change Labs International's chairman, and McGill University's dean of the faculty of management, says this approach mirrors the dialogue between a person who wants to learn something and the expert who is doing the teaching.

"So if someone asks a question about what is going on in e-commerce today, the reply will typically be a story with three or four points -- not just an anecdote but rather a structured content that allows the person asking the question to drop down to the next level and say 'explain more about point B or C,'" says Ross. "This process organizes knowledge in a way that works more like the brain, as opposed to collecting a huge number of articles and then having people search around the maze for the information they need."

Unlike data warehouses, Change Labs International's knowledge management system puts information in context, says Ross. This doesn't happen automatically -- no electronic spider goes through the data. Instead, a producer or gatekeeper drops in the information into a template. "Everything in this technology has context," says Ross. "Content does not exist on its own, so when you're reading it, you actually know what this piece of information means."

But even with the most brilliantly conceived knowledge management model and the latest and best technologies, ultimately, it is the human factor that counts. Unless there is buy-in from both management and rank and file, even the best knowledge management system will surely fail.

"The hardest part about setting up a knowledge management system was getting people to step up to it and see its value," says Candy Grant, process improvement and quality manager for ADC Telecommunications, a Minneapolis-based broadband company with offices in Toronto, Edmonton, Ireland and Australia. "And on the senior management side, they had to see that what we were doing was worth the time we were taking to do it because no matter what strategy you're implementing, you've got to have support from above."

Why would anyone resist something that is so obviously to his or her advantage? The most commonly cited reason is, it takes work. Sharing information takes time and more than a little bit of effort. Even when a framework exists to make it easier and faster, submitting information still means a few extra steps to add to an already busy day.

A knowledge-is-power mentality within some organizations is also proving to be a stumbling block on the road to a knowledge culture. Some people are just not inclined to share what they know. More than likely, they are afraid their company will see them as a less valuable asset if they no longer possess something that no one else in the company does.

Getting support from senior management isn't always easy either. As Grant states, they have to see some kind of return on the time employees will be investing building and participating in a knowledge management system. And they have to be convinced that their own time will be spent wisely participating in the system as well.

So what can companies do to nurture a knowledge-sharing culture? Sometimes, says Grant, the need just outweighs the objections. In ADC's case, the company was growing at such a fast clip and expanding its operations to other parts of the globe; sharing best practices across departments and distances became an absolute necessity.

"Our organization is made up of mainly software developers and engineers -- very skilled professionals but scarce resources," says Grant. "And with our market changing so rapidly, it was so important to take good practices and leverage them quickly across the organization."

Once employees started to use ADC's knowledge management system, its value quickly became so obvious that to not take advantage of it would be like reinventing the wheel -- it just makes no sense. "Once they saw the value, people wanted to participate," says Grant. "When they knew this was going to be a repository that they could easily access, they wanted in."

At the WSIB, getting people to use and contribute to the agency's knowledge management system was also a challenge, says Sooknanan. The agency has about 5,000 staff spread out across the province, and with no budget or directive from senior management, Sooknanan knew effecting a cultural change on such a large scale would not be easy.

"I believe that 50% of your success depends on a culture that buys into knowledge management," says Sooknanan. "But the problem is, if you build a knowledge management system, they won't necessarily come."

So what did he do? He put up a watercooler -- that is, a virtual one. Sooknanan created an informal repository where employees could just "shoot the breeze." It turned out to be a stroke of genius. In the first three days, the WSIB Watercooler -- as it is now referred to by all staff-received more 19,000 hits.

WSIB employees began using the Watercooler for things like exchanging recipes, finding out which restaurant serves the best sushi, who can recommend a good babysitter. Initially, says Sooknanan, management questioned the wisdom of providing employees with a forum for personal matters. But Sooknanan convinced them that an informal repository like the Watercooler was one of the best ways to ease people into a more formal framework.

Besides, the Watercooler's relaxed atmosphere made employees less self-conscious and more forthcoming with ideas. And that, says Sooknanan, is essentially what knowledge management is all about. "Knowledge management is not just about existing information but also creating new ideas, and the Watercooler is a place that encourages new ideas."

Today, says Sooknanan, WSIB's knowledge management repositories are bursting at the seams with information, so much so that the agency is now faced with a new challenge: how to improve access to this wealth of knowledge. WSIB has been lauded for its innovation in this area, with awards from such organizations as the Smithsonian Institute and the U.S.'s Chief Information Officer magazine. Sooknanan has become a sought-after speaker at knowledge management symposiums.

But the success of a knowledge management system is not determined by how much information it has in its archives, says Sooknanan, or how many awards it receives. The real gauge is how much people are using it, and how it is improving the way they work.

"By implementing a knowledge management system, you're making it easier for staff to find information," says Sooknanan. "But you've also created a large community within your organization, and this community has a knowledge-sharing culture. I think that's when you know your efforts have paid off."

Marjo Johne ([e-mail]) is a Toronto-based freelance writer. Her articles can also be found in the technology section of The National Post.