This is the fourth in a new AOK series featuring the known practices of knowledge champions who are not consultants or gurus, but quiet, unassuming knowledge professionals who are "just doing it" for their organizations. The first Leading Lights are being selected from among the 45 breakout speakers who presented at the March 13-15 AOK/Delphi Group Enterprise Learning and Knowledge Exchange Summit in Palm Springs, California, U.S.

An interview with Rene Schmidt, Chief Technology Officer,
and Dan Stepchuk, Senior Manager of Organization Development

Knowledge Management at Corel:
Team, Innovate and Drive Change

By Fred Shoeps
AOK Leading Lights Reporter

Corel has earned its reputation for its award-winning graphics and business productivity applications for PCs and Macs. In 2001 Corel launched a three prong strategic initiative that will be gaining momentum throughout 2002. Through core capabilities, acquisitions, partnerships and alliances Corel is positioning itself on the web, in the enterprise and in the XML space to drive future growth.

To drive change two individuals -- Rene Schmidt and Dan Stepchuk -- with very different backgrounds, are teamed up to create new possibilities for Corel through knowledge management. Rene, a Corel veteran with deep experience and expertise in technology, was named Chief Technology Officer by Corel's president in March of 2001. Dan, Senior Manager of Organization Development, is a newcomer, with expertise and experience in human dynamics, learning, organizational design, and virtual teaming, joined Corel in July of 2001.

Dan and Rene illustrate powerfully the possibility that the whole can be much more than the sum of its parts. By leveraging and combining their expertise in technology, strategy, human development, and organizational design Dan and Rene are creating new possibilities for Corel, impossible for either to invent on his own.

AOK: Dan and Rene thank you. AOK appreciates the opportunity to interview the two of you as a team. Would you share with us who you are?

Rene: I am the Chief Technology Officer for Corel, although lately I've been referred to as the VP of Innovation. A lot of the initiatives we will be talking about are driven by the principles of innovation and are being incorporated at Corel. In working with Dan I've been provided access to the human resource aspects of managing knowledge as opposed to just the technology aspects with which I am concerned from an assets point of view.

Dan: I am new to Corel joining last summer in July as Senior Manager of Organization Development . What excited me is where Corel is at as a business. When I joined Corel was resetting its business plans and strategy, and investing in building the organization to deliver that business plan. What I found particularly exciting is working with the various leaders in the business and with my background I was able to provide perspective on strategy, people systems, capability development and organizational design to accelerate the building of needed organizational capabilities.

Arriving here and learning about the work that Rene was doing was very interesting in that we both saw right away that our work was very much related and that we needed to connect our work and integrate it better.

Rene: Yes, we recognized that we had similar concerns about how knowledge was managed, how people were enrolled in what they were doing, how they were being measured, how people's work fit into the strategy for the organization. We recognized that there were many similarities in our thinking and that one approach was definitely not as powerful as both combined.

Dan: One of my responsibilities is for employee development and learning within the company. Our approach to knowledge management is really about learning and knowledge transfer; knowledge and communication are almost the flipside of the same coin and that is why it is so important that Rene and I and his team stay linked and that our knowledge and learning strategy are very closely coupled.

Rene: What we are recognizing is that innovation is something that all companies are aspiring to do in order to keep growing and generate more revenue and be successful. Innovation comes from many ingredients and knowledge management is starting to be recognized as one of the key areas for gaining competitive advantage. This is because you are taking into account what you already know much better than you would have previously. Just knowing what you know allows you to plan for acquiring more know-how in order to move forward.

AOK: To recap -- in effect you are bringing together the human side and the technology side in a partnership that allows you to do more than either of you could do on your own?

Rene: Yes, definitely. Imagine an organization requiring a center of excellence in a certain technology, or process, e.g., a technology or marketing process or otherwise. You can't get such a center of excellence without determining what are the centers of excellence which you need -- the strategic element ­ as well as determining the structures to get there. You need to know your capabilities; you need to know the human side of the equation.

AOK: Give us a sense of what drives each of you and what you love to do.

Dan: I jump out of bed and race to work because I really am enjoying the set of challenges I face ­ for me I get to bring together in this organization many perspectives. My objective is to support Corel's ability to quickly execute on its business strategy to make it a real player in the market spaces it wants to compete in and simultaneously make it a really great place to work and a place to build a career. When you look at the studies what motivates and excites people at work they often mention that people want meaningful work, they want effective leadership, they want to stay on the leading edge of their technology and their profession. Rene and his team are going after the same things ­ we have a symbiotic relationship -- we are both developing content and delivery systems that can work together.

I studied virtual organizations, virtual teams and distributed organizations and how do they collaborate and get unified around a strategic direction. How do you tie groups together with technology? In partnering with Rene we bring together the technology pieces that accelerate my push into how we link together these different parts of our newly grown organization made up of multiple locations. We build focus and share knowledge. We want the combination of all the pieces to come together as a great place to work for everyone at Corel. This is very exciting.

Rene: I first got introduced to the whole concept of knowledge management when I became CTO. I realized the role of CTO was ambiguous and I needed to spend time to understand how I could best impact the organization. One of the problems I encountered was that we didn't have a good understanding what our technology strengths were. So one of the first things I did was put together a research team to help understand those strengths and share our strengths within the organization ­ and also tap into external strengths. At that time I didn't know to call it knowledge management. I encountered issues of classification, of getting people to use the same language. I went to a conference where I heard of the extended organization. This opened my eyes to looking not just within your organization but also at all the people who are networked with you externally. I realized that what I was getting into was knowledge management. I was learning about how to network internally and externally, how to create some sort of memory of your skills, how to find knowledge quickly and share it.

That is what has led us to where we are today. We have put together research groups to tap into the outside world while at the same time recognizing what our strengths are internally. Dan has provided us with a very strong framework to do that for our organization. Early on we encountered the classic issues of knowledge management. People didn't want to give up or share their knowledge because they felt they would loose their advantage or power. To convert the culture from one where individual knowledge is important to one where collective knowledge is important is the challenge we are facing. And that is something I could never do from a technology point of view alone. That is very exciting!

AOK: Corel has been in the news in terms of acquisitions and growth. These must provide key challenges including those related to knowledge management.

Dan: We began working a collaborative integration process day one when the deal is closed. We set up collaborative processes to start building trust, to build up relationships to knock down the barriers -- we quickly put in place the intranet, to share knowledge, to partner and set a really constructive tone to build momentum in moving forward. The challenges include picking the high leverage areas -- one area is bringing the leadership team together to partner, to learn about the values each brings individually and collectively. To have the body of the organization team up is huge in terms of communication needs and trying to have the organization work it both horizontally and vertically. Mechanisms such as all employee communication, forums will help build that common knowledge and common sense of what we are as a company. Where we are all trying to go together becomes really important.

AOK: Bringing together the capability and knowledge you collectively possess sounds very exciting.

Rene: Knowledge Management is key in integrating acquisitions from a technology point of view as well. Not only in terms of our hard assets, assets we have developed in software, but also the other skills throughout the organization -- in sales channels, in marketing, and so on. It is when you look at all the strengths and combine them you come out with something much stronger. On the technology side it is a challenge to discover all those pieces that will be valuable to everyone -- that collective knowledge. I find that in working with the folks from the new acquisitions they are very much enrolled in sharing as a way of contributing to each other right away. That has been a lot of fun including adopting their strengths and introducing technologies.

Dan: We are not about "do it our way." Instead we believe in the value of what others bring to Corel. Our new colleagues have an awful lot of important knowledge and technology and savvy on how to sell it to customers. We really need that and we value that and want to integrate them into our business; we ask them to teach us so that we can combine all our strengths.

AOK: What is Knowledge Management at Corel?

Rene: So far at the infrastructure level what we believed in was the competitive advantage knowledge management brings to organizations that Corel could access simply by tapping into its strengths that already existed. We are a fairly large organization. As a small organization it was very easy to communicate closely with everybody; you know exactly what is going on. As we have become a large organization individuals are still tapping into their contacts the way they did when we were small; however, this form of sharing of knowledge does not make it easy to know across our large organization. We now have an asset list of gems, a database with drill-down information to allow you to identify the people who have expertise as well as identify external information and sources. We have done a survey to find out what kind of technological skills people have. We want to understand how quickly we can move as an organization to understand our strengths and our gaps. We will expand that to the entire organization in the future. With this knowledge we work with Dan in order to develop programs to maintain and strengthen our capability. We have an online database to look up technologies by keywords; you can look for groups of people with knowledge about technology. This is very useful if you want to put together a workgroup and want the input of ten of the best people in the area. Next steps are to have more of our people participate to feed the knowledge base.

Dan and his group were instrumental in how we reached out to our people. We approached building our website and database in context of building organizational strength.

Dan: Imagine you were an ex-Micrografx now new Corel employee out in Portland Oregon. You receive an e-mailed invitation to join our effort to connect you to all the technology resources and talent in the company. The message was that we are going to give you access to all the resources in the company as well as some external resources. By sharing your knowledge you become part of a network across the company.

Rene: The drive came from discussions with new people who had questions such as, "Oh, we have skills in this area? That's great; I need to talk to them." Another driver was discussions around emerging technologies and the need to know who was working on these emerging technologies. We recognized the need for people to find each other easily and quickly. Coincidentally to this internal need was my drive to bring more innovation into the organization. I heard a speaker talk about building centers of excellence. It was very clear the first step was to know what you have. The technology asset inventory was only the beginning. It had to be followed up with people skills to be effective.

AOK: In terms of centers of excellence are you pursuing these in context of communities of expertise -- as an organizational means to share and connect?

Rene: Yes. Here is an area that Dan and I clicked the most -- from an organizational point of view -- to fit centers of excellence into the strategic intent of the organization. However, the same thing applies from an innovation point of view. You have to build these areas of expertise if you want to compete. Centers fits into numerous realms: business strategy, organization development, innovation, and getting people focused and delivering greater value.

AOK: As a place to dialogue across the organization?

Dan: Yes. The challenge is to provide just enough structure in order to develop functional excellence while allowing lateral networking around many different interests and topics.

AOK: As knowledge management becomes a natural aspect of a business we should be able to observe changes in how we do business. What are you looking for as you move into the future?

Dan: Corel is on a path to becoming a fast moving organization that can quickly determine its challenges in the marketplace and effectively execute to gain market leadership. That is what is driving where we are trying to take the business. How do you do that in a way where people are excited about contributing to the success of the business? Success in context of what the customer is looking for, what customers value, how that contributes to our plans in any given segment. It is about making people feel connected to making the business successful. Supplying them with networks and support, enabling them to develop additional capability to empower them. It is about creating a high performance culture and designing the organization to be able to reconfigure it quickly as demands shift.

Rene: Let me add some underlying principles to extend on what Dan said. Organizational awareness is one of these principles. A good strong self-awareness of the organization is very powerful strategically. The other principle is about communications. Organizations are really just a series of communications. All we are doing is communicating in organizations. We live and breathe e-mail, meetings, converting of ideas into computer languages. I see knowledge management as a way for us to communicate better. Knowledge management is about the next generation of communication much more flexible, much more human in context of our systems. It is going to happen regardless. Much of what we are focusing on in Corel's Smart Content Revolution strategy deals with the whole issue of making content more pervasive and easier to exchange and move around the world.

AOK: In that context talk about the 'eWorkplace,' being able to 'be' and 'team' in such spaces. How do you see the future in context of such workplaces.

Rene: In the last thirty years the computer industry hasn't actually met the needs of people; it has been very good for the application vendors. The industry failed on the user interface side, in integration into human behavior, and in dealing with the sociological issues. We've solved tool problems, e.g., speech recognition. We haven't made the experience very reliable or very easy. Perhaps knowledge management will push the next wave substantially changing organizations and people's lives.

Dan: Adding to what Rene said and reflecting on it let me share some points in studying behavior of teams and organizations when they are operating in virtual space. While organizations that operate this way have made progress getting more comfortable operating this way, fundamentally human beings still need to look into the whites of each other's eyes in order to build truly trusting relationships. Anyone who has tried to resolve conflict by e-mail knows what I am talking about. It is a really great challenge

Rene: Yes. People still need to meet and be together. Some companies are trying to mimic human behavior. I suspect it is a long way off.

The challenge is how to put people into an eWorkplace not how do you put eWorkplace into people. Right now many people are terrified in using computers. They blame themselves when something goes wrong. People who are terrified don't take into consideration that the application was poorly written and that its developers didn't take into consideration how a human being will interact with it.

AOK: In closing what last thoughts do you have for our readers?

Dan: I am very appreciative of the collaboration I have with Rene and his team -- the way they see the world. The strengths they bring in collaborating and how we bring our different specialties together provides opportunity to create something new. Collaboration and diversity is making it possible to invent our own approach to knowledge management, organization design and capability development. This is a very exciting place for me to be working in today. I would say people should trust their instincts, their reading of the situation. Use what you have. There isn't one correct approach -- go with what you know and what you don't know.

Rene: It's exactly that. We got onto knowledge management because we needed to understand more about the organization, because we wanted to make changes and improvements -- and recognized we don't know as much as we wanted to know about what we have internally. We realized that others could benefit from what we learned as well. And then we found out there is a term for our entire investigation and sharing information: knowledge management. It isn't that we went out and read about the latest trends and saw that we needed one of those knowledge management things in our company.

We needed to solve real world problems and found out afterwards that there were many other people who are facing the same problems. Knowledge Management is very new and there aren't very many companies who have figured out how to do a good job of it ­ that is why it is important to use your own instincts and do what is best for the organization.

AOK: Dan and Rene, thank you very much for your thoughts and insights into knowledge management.

In closing:

At the time of his announcement Rene commented on what he sees his role to be as CTO:

One of my key objectives is to ensure Corel is leading the charge of technological innovation in our markets by fostering a learning environment. Strategy, innovation and the ability to build and articulate a compelling vision are important parts of my plan to help the company thrive.

In Dan, Rene has found a partner to deliver on those objectives. Together they are inventing new possibilities for Corel to thrive.

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