Connecting People with People
To spark innovative thinking, technology should focus on con-
necting people with people rather than on providing codified
knowledge. Much professional problem solving and nearly all of
the most innovative problem solving involves the perception
of analogies rather than the straightforward application of a process
or rule. Knowledge management systems conceived in the codifi-
cation-access model focus on providing all the knowledge that a
user needs in order to be able to act on someone else’s idea. A sys-
tem designed to support problem solving by analogy would take a
very different approach. Professionals would be able to search a col-
lection of short stories (perhaps one- or two-page case studies) that
sketch out situations their peers had faced, innovations developed
in those situations, and results or work in progress. The stories
would be written not to enable the reader to be able immediately
to apply the new technique but rather to enable the reader to
understand to whom he or she might want to speak to in order
to learn about ideas and analogies worth exploring. The system has
done its work if the user connects with a peer or a few peers who
can provide valuable dialogue (often mutually valuable).
Pfizer implemented a system of this kind in its worldwide
marketing organization around the time of its merger with Warner-
Lambert and was able to provide newer members in particular
with a much richer connection to the organization than even a
very good system to manage fully codified knowledge could have
provided.
Folding Knowledge Management into Process Management
Wherever possible, systems designed to access knowledge should be
integrated with systems designed to support business processes. As
noted earlier, one of the factors contributing to low usage for many
systems is that a professional needs to step outside the tasks that
he or she does in order to access knowledge as a separate act.
Again, an analogy with TurboTax helps illustrate the alternative.
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