Reserve Bank of New Zealand 227Copyright © 2005, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without writtenpotential benefits of knowledge management, the Bank was, from the outset, comfortable
with the idea that the potential benefits were not easily measurable.
The Bank’s journey to knowledge management has been a holistic one, and has
focussed on culture, structure, and infrastructure. In some ways, the CIO regards
technology as the easy part and believes that the greater challenge is in bringing about
the change, especially when benefits are more intangible. Change is easier to enact when
it can be hooked to something rather than change for the sake of change; therefore,
technology is often used as the hook. However, he stresses, that from the Bank’s
viewpoint, knowledge management is not all about technology. It is not the technologists
but the information manager who has responsibility for the Bank’s knowledge manage-
ment strategy. He said:
They’re the ones who are used to thinking about unstructured information, whereas if
I was to give it to a technology person, they’d be trying to put a structure round it. When
you do that, you’re going to lose a lot of value from it (Anand, 2004).
There are still several strategies that have not yet been put into place. Although the
review of the document management system is partially completed, the introduction of
a potential solution is seen to be one that will potentially meet some resistance. The Bank
will approach this with the insight gained from previous initiatives and with the
experience of knowing that while the road may at times be difficult, the view from the other
side is generally better.
There has certainly been progress made in terms of recording past decisions. This
has mainly been achieved by targeting individuals developing an e-mail-centric
organisation whereby the majority of discussions and debate are captured in threads
within e-mails. This has proved successful to date, but moving forward, there may be less
use of e-mail and so the Bank will need to initiate alternative approaches to formalise some
of the processes.
There are also a number of legacy systems operating within parts of the organisation,
such as Human Resources. The integration of these is being addressed in the single point
of access activity. At this point, the project is still largely in the stages of trying to
understand exactly what is the boundary and scope of the project.
The Bank is also investigating the idea of “yellow pages,” a system of identifying
those within the organisation with specific expertise. The context of the system will be
somewhat wider than other systems in operation in that the extent of the experience will
relate not just to that of the person’s job but in terms of their wider experience. A good
example of this is a staff member who survived the Kobe earthquake in 1995. He has talked
to many groups within the Bank about preparedness and issues such as business
continuity. Although that experience may not relate directly to his position at the Bank,
it is invaluable in the wider context and makes him an excellent knowledge source for a
yellow pages system.
An ongoing challenge for the Bank, like several other organisations, is that of
continuing to meet the ongoing business demands with the level of available resources.
In that environment, keeping knowledge management in the forefront is a challenge and
needs to be achieved through practical initiatives that can demonstrably provide
tangible and/or strategic benefits. This requires commitment from within the organisation
as well as ongoing communication. In the Bank’s case, it looked on knowledge manage-