Into the big blue yonder

IBM has a string of KM accolades to its name – so how come it’s moving away from the whole knowledge management model? Because the decentralising impact of Web 2.0 calls for a new approach, or what the big blue calls ‘knowledge sharing’.

It’s a bold move considering the firm has been working under the management model for over a decade. Chris Cooper, knowledge sharing solutions leader at IBM Global Business Services (GBS), deems it a ‘philosophical repositioning’. “Management suggests control:  control of process and control of environment. The sharing tag is quite important to us,” he explains.

IBM now sees organic and unimposed sharing as the biggest agent in the circulation of knowledge. Its stated strategy is to facilitate that sharing, not through any vertically integrated structure but through the empowerment of its many communities and individuals to network as openly and efficiently as possible.

“The focus was very much on the tools and the processes,” explains Luis Suarez, a KM specialist who works alongside Cooper in GBS. “There has been this shift in that the focus should be on the people.” As a leader in IBM’s community building team, that’s precisely what Suarez is aiming to achieve.

Killing off knowledge management

One area of KM that IBM found especially challenging was capturing knowledge. Incentivising staff to contribute to a centralised database and keeping that data up-to-date was a struggle. Happily, the social networking impetus of Web 2.0 has negated all that. The enthusiasm inherent in successful online communities almost takes care of the problem by itself.

“If we can build sufficient maturity in our internal communities, they can take on that role,” Cooper says. “They will start to become actively responsible for the education of their members and for the identification and generation of new intellectual assets.”

IBM’s early adoption of blogs and wikis appears to have paid dividends in this regard and internal take-up has built up to impressive levels. As of April 2006, IBM’s blogging environment, Blog Central, had 23,000 users and around 3500 active blogs, generating 50,000 entries and roughly the same number of comments. IBM’s wiki environment took off around the same time and now has 100,000 users, a third of the corporate population.

And this activity wasn’t promoted by rule either, according to Ian McNairn, web innovation and technology director at IBM software. Employees were left to choose for themselves what they thought was worthwhile.

“In many ways, Web 2.0 has moved us beyond the old dilemma of tacit and explicit knowledge, and allowed us to look at collaborative working in a broader sense; one that, coincidentally, enabled extremely good knowledge management,” he says.

Web 2.0 covers such a broad set of definitions that people are wont to discount it but, like it or not, it heralds the dawn of a participatory web. Mc Nairn considers it integral to IBM’s many knowledge initiatives.

A war on many fronts

The next stage in IBM’s knowledge evolution was allowing staff to access and utilise the mountain of knowledge they had amassed. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and Atom were both big drivers in keeping things manageable, but they weren’t enough.

Last year, IBM launched its own social book-marking system, Dogear. A corporate equivalent of web services like del.icio.us, it grabs a URL and a description (tag) and also allows access to lists of tags from the profiles of other users. You can pivot across users to find someone with similar interests and then subscribe, via RSS, to their own tags, or contact them directly. As with all social book-marking, descriptions are user-generated. It follows a folksonomy rather than a taxonomy concept, so no one is shoe-horned into a hierarchy.

Another IBM strategy takes a different approach. Unlike Dogear, which helps make knowledge navigable, IBM’s wiki environment, QED Wiki, is mash-up that allows the non-technical user to aggregate content from multiple sources, such as widgets, blogs, wikis, contact lists, podcasts, or one of almost a hundred plug-ins, and present it on one site.

Like much of IBM’s knowledge sharing, the take-up for this has also been organic. A concept model was developed for a competition two years ago and now it’s in common usage. It is most popular as a travel guide for IBM offices and it’s even possible to rent a Hertz hire car through it.

That IBM’s workforce should need travel guides is not surprising. As well as having a diverse knowledge base, it has a diverse global presence, too, so making sure staff are connected is critical. Self-developed Lotus Anytime is an instant messaging (IM) service with what McNairn calls “a lot of back-end connectors”. This allows compatibility with other IM environments but, perhaps more importantly, its buddy list can be customised to the point where it allows you to see people’s CVs, photographs, what project they’re working on, who they report to and who else they’re talking to.

It also ties into IBM’s corporate directory, Blue Pages, so the database is fairly comprehensive. Location awareness is based on IP address, so you can see where people are working and even geographically map where your buddies are – convenient for those working in a new office, for example.

Another front worth mentioning is the widely-reported IBM Jam. The last one, Innovation Jam, occurred in September. For over 72 hours, more than 104,000 participants from over 100 countries (including employees, their families, partners and customers) brain-stormed online. Externally, doubts were raised as to the practicality of such a project, but in November IBM announced it was to invest US$100 million in the Jam’s 10 best ideas.

Knowledge as an ethical driver 

"All this makes IBM an atypical company, of course. Many of its knowledge initiatives and their associated software developments have ended up as client-facing revenue generators, as the big blue capitalises on its knowledge leadership. Lotus Anytime has become one of a number of commercially available knowledge-related products, for example, and IBM’s business consultants regularly advise on the broader issues.

One consequence of this commercial synergy is that IBM has set its own standards. It behoves IBM to be a KM paragon, internally, and knowledge sharing – especially in a Web 2.0 world – acts as an ethical driver in itself. IBM’s Facebook policy is a good example. Many corporate employers have shut down Facebook access at work; in the UK, some have even sacked staff for posting derogatory comments. Inside IBM, there are 22,000 people on Facebook every day.

“It’s a social cultural thing,” says McNairn. “If you’re a company with something to hide, you’ll stay away from social networking. But IBM wants to embrace those tools, and then take them to the extreme to see how valuable they’ll be from a business perspective.”

Looking at it more broadly, it could be that IBM is yet another example of the end of the labour-based economy. While KM leaders like Davenport have been sceptical about the difference Web 2.0 will make to organisations, community facilitators like Suarez feel differently.

“Command and control corporations are no longer going to be there,” he says. “People need to be freed to share what they know. Some have said that social networking isn’t going to change things, but my take is that is has already - and it’s what distinguishes good companies from great companies.”