Preparing
for Conversations
with Stan Garfield
Choosing
Connection v. Collection:
Open v. Closed, Practical v. Theoretical
Stan Garfield
KM Leader, Engagement Knowledge Management Initiative
Hewlett-Packard
 Introduction
While doing a case
report for Inside Knowledge magazine on HP's Engagement Knowledge
Management initiative, I became so impressed with Stan Garfield
I'm still writing about him. In my 'last word' column for the
February issue I'm using Stan Garfield as 'the dream candidate'
when making up the job description for the ideal KManager. I'm
also saying there's only one Stan Garfield with 22 years experience
and practice in the journey of DEC, Compaq and HP that led to
today's Hewlett-Packard KM program.
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Biography
Because Stan's personal
journey was so integral to the convergence of the three companies,
I wrote this sidebar, which is quite different than most biographies:
Personal success
story
Individual journey through multiple mergers assures KM continuity
and growth
Stan Garfield's
personal journey through the convergent journeys of Digital Equipment
Corporation, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard is a story of individual
passion and intellectual capital at work.
"I have always
been interested in communication and in sharing information,"
Garfield says.
In elementary school
he published a one-page newsletter. In high school he operated
a radio station. In college he enrolled as a journalism student
but got hooked on computer programming and transferred to an
engineering school.
His work as a technician involved writing applications for speech
and hearing research, for cardiac catheterization and on to developing
operating systems and compilers. But technology did not bury
his love for the human side of business.
"I wanted to
become a manager," Garfield says, "so I took a job
managing the computer operations at St. Louis University Medical
School which had the first Tandem computer in St. Louis."
When he moved to
Digital in 1983 it was with a strong background in technology
and management and a continuing love for personal communication
and knowledge sharing. He was soon ahead of KM's 'time.' As a
manager at Digital he compiled information useful to his team
members that included key contact lists and pointers to reference
material. The key contacts list became one of the most popular
documents at Digital since it was essentially the yellow pages
of the company.
A service called
Reader's Choice was launched at Digital and Garfield used it
to manage subscriptions to the key contacts list and numerous
newsletters he published. He had gone full circle from journalist
to a techie and back to journalist again. He eventually had over
30,000 subscribers to his various periodicals at Digital. He
used Digital's VAXnotes as a tool for collaboration, communication
and Q&A. By 1995 the Internet was starting to blossom and
Digital developed its own intranet. Garfield became editor of
the Digital Professional Services Intranet.
By the time Digital
launched its KM programme in 1996, the choice of a leader was
obvious-Stan Garfield, of course. He added to his experience
and natural instinct for KM by visiting the Center for Business
Knowledge run by Ernst & Young in Cleveland.
"I slowly built
the Digital KM programme," he recalls, "but it took
awhile to get critical mass, management attention and field support.
I built a virtual team of early adopters, representatives from
each of the organizations, and a few core team members."
In 1998 Compaq bought
Digital. Compaq did not have much of a KM programme and so Garfield's
programme became the one used by the new systems integration
organisation. In 2000 he was asked to help create a corporate
KM strategy for Compaq but not much was accomplished before the
Compaq/HP merger was announced. After managing projects in the
merger 'clean room,' Garfield took charge of KM for HP Services
Consulting & Integration, first in the Americas, and then
worldwide.
So there you have
the story behind the story-the power of personal knowledge management
combined with corporate knowledge management to produce the best
possible outcome in the midst of major organisational change.
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Pre-Dialogue Remarks:
Stan Garfield
I would like to
invite discussion on these three topics:
- Connection versus
collection-asking for help at the time of need as opposed to
collecting documents in advance of a specific need. Bruce Karney
calls this "demand-driven KM." Connection involves
using communities and social networks to request knowledge in
response to a specific requirement. Collection involves capturing
contributions to repositories which can later be searched at
the time of need. Both connection and collection are useful,
but how much should each be emphasized in a KM program?
- Open versus closed
access to knowledge - should knowledge be openly and widely shared
or tightly controlled and locked down? Some people want to narrowly
restrict community membership and limit access to repositories
to members of a specific business, region, or type of employee.
Others would like to include everyone who can possibly contribute
to a community, and allow repository access to any employee of
the company. What are the pros and cons of each approach?
- Practical versus
theoretical KM - down-to-earth discussion on real-world problems
and solutions. Comments on previous STAR series have included:
"I've found
the AOK discussions to be awfully theoretical for the last few
weeks, so I hope you can bring them back to Earth."
"Most of us
do not work in organizations and with people that would respond
positively to comments that include such terminology as concept
mapping, intellectual capital, narrative repositories, and knowledge
management. . . . Real world businesses are focused on the bottom
line, how to get where they are going as quickly as they can
so that they can produce their service/product for a customer
profitably. . . . Translate your insights into everyday speak
and lose the jargon. So you tell me, what will all this upper
level, esoteric conversation do for me when I go to work on Monday?"
In Tom Stewart's
"The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital
and the Twenty-first Century Organization" (former STAR
Series moderator and continuing member), chapter 5, pages 85-87,
the following key elements of a KM program are defined based
on the experience of Steve Denning (former moderator and still
member) at the World Bank:
- communities of
practice
- place (online presence
for the communities)
- help desk
- Yellow Pages (who-knows-what
directory)
- primer (FAQ)
- knowledge artifacts
(records of previous projects, emphasizing best practices and
lessons learned)
- bulletin board
- doorway (a provision
for outside access)
Do AOK members agree
with this list, and if so, how many of the eight elements have
been implemented within their organizations? If not, what additions
or deletions do you suggest? Please relate some practical examples
of what is working for you and what has been tried in the past
and did not work. What are you planning to try next that will
improve your business results?
Regards,
Stan
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Case Report, Inside
Knowledge magazine
Capture and
reuse
HP Engagement KM initiative balances people, process and technology
By Jerry Ash
The subject of knowledge
capture and reuse has always created tension in the KM community
because it carries visions of IT-driven knowledge repositories,
choking with documents difficult to find and lacking in relevance
to the searcher. Thus, knowledge capture and reuse has often
been given short shrift in a KM initiative.
Part of the inattention
to capture and reuse may also be political. The KM community
has been on constant defense against software providers who hijacked
knowledge management in the beginning with the promotion of information
management products wearing the 'emperor's new clothes'-the KM
label-without covering the fact they provided nothing more than
information retrieval technology with a new label.
That scenario has
caused many KM architects to give cautious or little attention
to one of the most powerful prospects in the knowledge arsenal-the
reuse of existing knowledge.
The situation has
been further compounded by KM's gravitation toward the social
side of knowledge management with an emphasis on the use of 'knowledge
on the hoof' through various types of social networks-powerful
tools in themselves but not alternatives to the capture and reuse
of codified knowledge.
Organizations that
attempt to get their arms around both tacit and explicit
knowledge do face real challenges in keeping the balance among
the KM domains of people, process and technology. Capture and
reuse is perhaps the biggest of those challenges.
This report tells
the unlikely story of a technology company's initiative
to establish a full scope, mission-driven programme balancing
people, process and technology to increase the reuse of both
explicit and tacit knowledge from consulting engagements to improve
the win rate, drive down sales and delivery costs, and increase
engagement quality.
It's HP's Engagement
KM (EKM) initiative.
Stan Garfield leads
the worldwide knowledge management programme for HP Services
Consulting & Integration. His personal journey through the
mergers and acquisitions of Digital Equipment Corporation, Compaq
and HP is a veritable history of the maturing of KM programs
through three organizations (see sidebar).
"The challenge
for a KM programme in a technology company is to keep technology
in balance with people and process," he says. "That
is the direction I have provided. "We have made progress
in the past 10 years but we are still facing some of the same
challenges. Our goal is to embed KM in our business processes
so that it is transparent but we are not there yet."
Not yet there, but
well on the way, and using the Engagement KM capture and reuse
initiative as the foundation.
The Legacy
The modern HP is
the result of a series of mergers and acquisitions that first
joined Digital Equipment Corporation with Compaq and then Compaq
with HP.
Digital was one
of the earliest pioneers of knowledge management with the development
of a collaboration tool in mid-1980s called VAXnotes. The tool
was well ahead of the general acceptance of the term 'KM' as
a management concept. The term 'community of practice' hadn't
yet been coined, but Patti Anklam, a former Digital employee,
recalls that the master list of conferences at Digital in the
mid-80s included 'communities of purpose,' 'communities of practice'
and 'communities of interest.' Debra M. Amidon, also with Digital
in the early years, remembers that in 1987 Digital and the Technology
Transfer Society co-sponsored the first conference in the US
focused on knowledge beyond the theories of artificial intelligence
- Managing
the Knowledge Asset into the 21st Century.
In 1996, both Digital
and HP began their own KM programs; and so, when HP merged with
Compaq in 2002, it brought together two companies with strong
knowledge-based histories.
It was through this
heritage that HP ended up with several knowledge management programs
in various business units, including the one for HP Services
Consulting & Integration now headed by Stan Garfield; he
joined Digital in 1983, launched Digital's first knowledge management
programme in 1996, helped develop the corporate KM strategy for
Compaq, and was part of the Merger & Integration Clean Room
which did the planning for the integration of Compaq and HP.
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The situation
Both Compaq and
HP had mature knowledge management history and programs in place
at the time of the merger, and integrating them was challenging.
When Garfield took over the Consulting & Integration KM programme
in 2004, he inherited those challenges. After eight years of
KM, the HP programme had skewed toward technology implementation
and content migration from one system to another. The people
and process sides of KM had been underemphasized, and as a result,
the KM programme was not viewed as supporting the business.
That would have
to change. The Consulting & Integration business unit was
where KM could do its most valuable work, with 10,000 consultants
worldwide and ongoing responsibilities to:
- achieve and sustain
an acceptable level of profitability,
- improve the win
rate so that revenue would steadily increase, and
- improve project
delivery so that its customers were satisfied and ready to buy
more services.
Before the Engagement
KM programme, Garfield recalls, consultants had no systematic
way to find out what had been done before. As a result, the same
mistakes were made repeatedly. For example, a mail migration
project once underestimated the amount of effort needed for implementation.
Having made this mistake before, future projects should have
been able to avoid repeated instances by incorporating lessons
learned in the writing of future bids. But in fact, two subsequent
bids made the same mistake and each of the three projects lost
money as a result.
"Any time a
new bid raised the question 'Where have we done this type of
project before?' a mad scramble would ensue, usually involving
mass emails," Garfield recalls. If the question were 'How
many of these projects have we done?' we would often have to
guess.
Consultant culture
There is a pervasive
cultural conflict with the idea of capture and reuse at HP where
the company tagline on its logo is 'Invent.' "We have to
remind people not to reinvent, Garfield says, "but
to invent only when absolutely necessary." Surveys show
that HP consultants perceive many of their projects as 'new'
and therefore unable to reuse content from previous projects.
"If this is true," Garfield challenges, "then
we should question why we are selling so many projects with unproven
solutions. If it is not true, then our consultants are not searching
the knowledge base first."
There are stories
aplenty about Big 8/6/5 consultancies and other major consulting
firms, which adopted KM as a product but never succeeded in getting
their own consultants to participate in knowledge sharing. Most
recently, in an issue of Inside Knowledge (Volume 9, Issue
2), Kent Greenes told the story of how he had been hired
as a 'rainmaker' to sell and provide KM consulting services for
SAIC but only now, after five years, has the company allowed
him to develop a formal corporate KM programme for the company.
"In our case,"
Garfield says, "we have not tried to sell KM products and
services very much, but we do have trouble getting consultants
to share what they know." At HP, he says it's a paradox.
"Everyone acknowledges we should share and reuse knowledge,"
he says. "However, actual progress has always been limited
by the fact that the overriding priority for consultants and
their managers is selling the next deal and keeping billable."
Thus the frequent
lament: "I know I should be using KM, but I just don't have
time."
"The fact that
they could save time by using KM escapes them and the
managers in the organisation don't insist on it," Garfield
says, "so there is always an effort to get increased participation.
"We have talked
for years about changing our culture to knowledge-sharing, but
I think it is very hard to change a culture," Garfield says.
"For example, if a consultant's manager asks every week
whether he is going to be billable that week, and doesn't ask
anything else, the consultant quickly figures out that all that
matters is being billable. If consultants are never asked to
demonstrate how they participate in a community or what content
they submitted to a repository, they assume it's not really that
important."
Re-launch strategy
A knowledge management
strategy based on capture and reuse could forecast a programme
that would focus primarily on document management- no change,
really, from the current system. But Garfield saw an opportunity
to use capture and reuse in a much broader and deeper way. To
be successful, he knew he needed an architecture that consultants
would see as a great tool to help them produce client proposals
that would make them billable-not a time-consuming secondary
activity but the framework for the work at hand-producing successful
bids and satisfied clients. That's the way Garfield would change
the culture.
"Re-launching
the KM programme under the banner of Engagement KM in 2004 allowed
us to introduce the proper balance between people, process, and
technology and to focus on meeting business needs," Garfield
says. "By setting measurable goals for the programme in
participation, capture, reuse, quality, and employee satisfaction,
and reporting progress to the executive team on a monthly basis,
we changed the perception of the programme and gained the sponsorship
of the senior executive."
The re-launch involved
a 10-point strategy:
- Balance people,
process, and technology with a project leader for each category.
- Put a strong leader
in place; adjust the team to have only strong members, and add
team members and offshore resources for specific projects to
increase the flow of deliverables.
- Establish a governance
and collaboration process to engage all regions and practices,
and to formally manage and communicate on all projects.
- Communicate regularly
through newsletters, training, web sites, and local events.
- Get the senior
executive to communicate regularly about the importance of the
programme.
- Hold a worldwide
face-to-face meeting of KM leaders to get everyone informed,
energized, and collaborating.
- Engage with other
KM programs, both within HP and external, to share ideas and
practice what we preach.
- Participate in
the corporate Knowledge and Intranet Management (KIM) Strategic
Leadership Team to help influence IT direction.
- Kill off low-priority
technologies, and turn over the important ones to the corporate
KIM team to free our team for new initiatives.
- Focus on three
basic goals, and stick to the basics - participate in a community,
collaborate on projects using team spaces, and search for and
submit project profiles.
The Engagement KM
architecture is built around the three domains of People, Process
and Technology (fig. 1). The domains do not comprise an organisational
structure but, rather, the components of the KM environment.
To assure that the programme does not focus primarily on technology,
each of the domains has a strong leader.
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EKM people
To assure the domains
work together, the strong domain leaders work as a team. Projects
regularly overlap among the categories but one team member is
assigned as the leader for each project based on the nature of
the work. The project leader is expected to collaborate with
the leaders of the other domains on a regular basis.
The domain leaders
plus one regional KM lead and one practice KM lead comprise the
Core Team. The Core Team plus two other regional KM leads and
three country KM leads form a KM Operations Team. Finally, a
worldwide KM Leads Team is composed of about 100 people who have
KM roles, primarily in HP Services.
Four direct reports
are full-time KM positions. KM regional leads are full-time people
whose jobs include substantial KM responsibilities. Most country
leads are volunteers but with recognition of their KM responsibilities
written into their full-time job descriptions.
Whether by control
or influence, Garfield plays an active role in recruiting strong
leaders throughout. He ensures that his direct reports are strong
leaders through the hiring process. He ensures strong leaders
are in place in the regions and practices by influencing their
managers. The KM Core and KM Operations Teams are governed by
Garfield. The KM Leads Team is open to anyone at HP who wishes
to join. Currently the team includes country KM leads, consulting
and integration practice KM leads, and representatives from Managed
Services, Technology Services, Presales, the Professions programme,
Strategic Proposal Centers, HPS Advanced Technology Group, HPS
Engagement Program Management Office and the Global Delivery
India Center.
"For the core
team I select strong leaders who can work collaboratively. For
KM Operations I look for field and headquarters leaders who are
the most active and creative. For KM Leads I reach out to as
many prospects as possible and invite them to join. I work hard
to ensure the biweekly calls are lively and feature good guest
speakers. I moderate the associated discussion forum to ensure
there are postings every week. I publish a weekly newsletter
with links to timely and practical information, and a monthly
one-page newsletter to keep people informed on programme progress."
Most of the connections
between teams are virtual but the second worldwide face-to-face
meeting was held in March 2005, with travel expenses being picked
up by senior executive sponsors. Bruce Karney (The Knowledge,
Inside Knowledge, Volume 9, Issue 2) planned the meeting
which included presentations, knowledge sharing, birds of a feather
sessions, workshops, breakouts and dinner every night. "Attendees
viewed it as a huge success, since many of them had never met
face-to-face before," Garfield says.
EKM process
Changing culture
is a long and arduous task and companies cannot wait for nature
to take its course in a rapidly changing marketplace. One of
the greatest challenges to KM is to 'get there' before the culture
does. Garfield has woven knowledge capture and reuse into the
engagement process to make that happen.
The most successful
of the processes is the HP Customer Engagement Road Map which
is not just a KM tool but the tool everyone must use during
a client engagement from opportunity creation to delivery. It
is the process, the way people work. It is the basis of the Engagement
Knowledge Map found on the HP Knowledge Network homepage which
is a kind of portal through which people work. The Knowledge
Network is a collection of tools, processes and people based
on knowledge HP and others have accumulated through experience
and learning.
The Engagement Knowledge
Map is a grid of steps and resources necessary to carry out a
client engagement. Down the left side column are resources for
documents, templates and source codes. It includes collaborative
tacit and explicit resources-team spaces, HP market research,
practice portals and communities, a project profile repository
and knowledge briefs (white papers).
Across the top of
the grid are five categories: opportunity creation, opportunity
evaluation, development and bid, negotiate and close, and deliver.
"People do
follow the roadmap because it is integrated into the process"
Garfield says. It's up to someone during Solution Opportunity
Approval & Reviews (SOAR) to ask, "What are you reusing
in this bid?" If the answer is "none" then the
question becomes "Why are you even bidding on this if you
don't even know if we've ever done this before?"
Collaborative Team
Spaces provided by the KM programme provide another work process
enabler that integrates KM into the process.
All HP engagements
require project teams which may or may not be easily assembled
in one space. To solve the problem and seize an opportunity to
embed KM further in the process, a tool has been developed for
assisting teams in setting up online team spaces in a couple
of minutes. That's right, an online collaborative space in
two minutes. Teams don't have to do it from scratch. The page
is a template already populated with things the team will need.
The team space is portal-like, but a collaborative place for
team members to work. The team can tailor the page to its own
needs.
"There's no
problem getting people to use this tool," Garfield says.
"The team spaces are powerful and they've really caught
on. We don't have to 'sell it' because people love it."
While compliance
on the team collaboration side of the equation is hugely successful,
only partial success has been attained so far on the capture
and reuse sides. At its best, the HP Knowledge Capture and Reuse
Process (see fig. 2) flows through a collaboration environment
to the reuse stage assured by the Knowledge Map and on to capturing
reusable content from each engagement. Unlike reuse, however-which
is integrated into the SOAR process-capture is not so rigidly
controlled.
"Knowledge
capture is a company mandate," Garfield says, "But
the HP culture is such that mandates don't necessarily get done.
Everyone agrees with knowledge capture and knows its value but
there are different levels of compliance. In the worse case,
nothing gets done. Most cases, however, end up somewhere in the
middle.
The desired level
of capture occurs in some cases." Capture of lessons learned,
Garfield says, is still at the lower level. He is not discouraged
that the HP Knowledge Capture and Reuse initiative has not yet
reached its full potential. "We are at Stage 4 in the APQC
Road Map for programme development which puts us at the 'Expand
and Support' level."
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EKM Technology
The tech leader
serves as liaison from the KM Core Team to the HP IT organisation
and coordinates all IT development and support for knowledge
management. He is responsible for the technology used in the
Knowledge Network including: search, community portals, threaded
discussion forums, collaborative team spaces, project profile
repository, project documentary library, contribution wizard
and usage reporting.
By having an IT
specialist as part of the Engagement KM Core Team, better communication
and understanding between the user group and the IT department
is assured. The 'KM techie' understands how the user group works
and is able to better communicate the type of support needed.
Here are the top
three tech priorities for fiscal year 2006:
- Stabilize the infrastructure
- Improve ease of
use of tools
- Implement one innovation
each quarter
Clearly, KM is no
longer being driven by the IT department at HP Services but supported
by IT in collaboration with the KM program's IT leader. There
is little chance now that KM at HP Services will again be skewed
toward technology, but there is a relationship in place that
assures technology will provide the right support system for
the KM programme.
Learn more
There is much more
to the HP Services story than you've learned here. There are
many more components to the KM Engagement initiative as well
as the overall HP KM programme.
To learn more, see
the 61 slides Garfield used in his presentation to the American Productivity and
Quality Center (APQC) in May, 2005. These detailed slides
include key P&L and operational indicators, the HP customer
engagement roadmap, the knowledge network components, the roles
of HP knowledge advisors not mentioned in this report and many
screen shots showing how to create team spaces, project profile
repository, project profile submission form, knowledge briefs,
community portals and distribution lists, a practice community
portal, HP forums, publications and a virtual classroom for webinars
and more.
From the legacy
of KM programs in three companies and a single manager who pulled
it all together during 22 years in all three companies, HP Services
has one of the most mature and effective programs on the planet.
Resources
- The Camelot of
collaboration, (IK/Knowledge Management, Volume 5, Issue 2).
Patti Anklam,
a former Digital employee now at Hutchinson Associates, Harvard,
MA, US
- Debra Amidon, formerly at Digital, CEO,
Entovation International
- Slide presentation, Stan Garfield, APQC, May,
2005
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