Firms capture staff
knowledge
VIRGINIA
GALT finds firms using technology to prevent 'institutional
Alzheimer's'
By VIRGINIA GALT
Friday, February 22, 2002 – Print Edition, Page C1
It's been called "institutional Alzheimer's" – the corporate memory loss
that occurs when key employees leave an organization, taking their knowledge
with them.
With the baby boom generation headed toward retirement, corporations are
becoming increasingly concerned about it, to the point where some are now
finding ways to probe employees' minds and "capture their knowledge"
electronically before they inevitably retire or move
on.
Clarica Life Insurance Co. of Waterloo, Ont., EDS Canada of Toronto and
multinational Procter & Gamble Co. of Cincinnati are among a growing number
of companies that encourage employees to share their expertise, in writing, so
it can be downloaded into data banks and made available to current and future
employees.
In a corporate version of "ask an expert," Clarica and Procter &
Gamble have adopted a system that allows employees from anywhere in their
far-flung operations to pick the brains of colleagues through a computerized
question-and-answer format. Sophisticated software sorts out questions that have
been asked before and retrieves the answers -- to spare the in-house experts
from answering the same question over and over again. But if a particular
question has not been posed, the system tracks down those most likely to come up
with a solution.
The institutional knowledge base is built up and, in the case of Procter
& Gamble, employees who provide the most useful answers are celebrated on
the company's internal Web site. "Of course, they get bumped off after their
five minutes of fame," laughs Udai Shekawat, chief executive officer of
Bellevue, Wash.-based AskMe Corp., which developed the
technology.
When people are given credit for their contributions, they are generally
quite willing to help colleagues and, by extension, their employers, Mr.
Shekawat says in an interview. Most people are flattered to be asked for advice,
he said, and this "democratization of expertise" unleashes a lot of knowledge
that might otherwise have been overlooked.
Emile Querel, a vice-president in the e-solutions group at EDS Canada,
said more employers have come to believe that employees really are their most
valuable assets. "Every night, they walk out the door and all that information
goes with them. . . .
"There is a whole architecture evolving to capture that information," Mr.
Querel said. "We are working with a number of our clients in this whole area of
knowledge management, capturing knowledge . . . and making organizations less
vulnerable if people leave."
As an information technology services company, EDS Canada itself is
operating in an industry where talent is footloose and there is a lot of "churn"
or turnover.
EDS is building up its own
institutional memory bank as well as helping clients, Mr. Querel said. The
company has developed a skills inventory and work history for each employee.
Project reports are filed in the data base, so the next person working on a
similar project has ready access to information about what worked, what didn't
and who to call for advice. EDS also keepstrack of its "alumni," some of whom are in the position to swing back and
help out on occasion, he said.
Hubert Saint-Onge, senior vice-president for strategic capabilities at
Clarica, said knowledge management is the key to success in the new competitive
environment and Clarica's goal is to "leverage our substantial investment in
technology to make the most of the knowledge contained within the
firm."
The insurance firm strives to match the technology to the way people
work, he said, "a social technology kind of approach" so that employees have
quick access to information from their desktop computers as they need
it.
This makes a network of help available "if you can't ask the guy in the
next cubicle," he said.
"It improves speed, it builds up knowledge."
Mr.
Saint-Onge said Canadian companies have been relatively slow to adopt technology
for such purposes, when compared with competitors in the
Yet, he said, it is a company's intangible assets, "this intellectual
capital or knowledge that a firm holds, that is its competitive edge in the new
knowledge era. . . .
"The key strategic issues that now face organizations revolve around
escaping their limits, applying their knowledge in different ways and building
an environment where learning is the norm."