Rebuilding Core Competencies When a Company Splits 55Copyright © 2005, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without writtento figure out an efficient way to share the knowledge with everyone who had a need to
know in both organizations. Again, the sharing of knowledge is person based and the
autonomous sharing includes such things as company intranets where individuals add
to the “information base” in order to help others better understand company situations.
This seemed valuable to the HP situation because in several of these studies, the HP
intranet was used as one of the best examples of information sharing and was a model
for how to do knowledge transfer. In addition, the company intranet was also cloned in
Agilent.
Clearly the HP intranet is an incredible source of information with over a terabyte
of data moving across the intracompany network daily. While the intranet meets the
criteria (as defined by Boland, Tenkasi, and Te’eni, 1994) of ownership, easy travel, and
multiplicity, it is also subject to lack of validity of content, anonymous owners, and
indeterminacy where interpretations of what is out there for public consumption are
unknown, incomplete, and often imprecise. A knowledge system that can support
distributed cognition needs to be oriented toward individuals who can not only add to
or help build the knowledge base with explicit information and knowledge, but who can
also reflect on the interpretations that are possible (Boland, Tenkasi, & Te’eni, 1994).
There is also a group of studies that fall into the organizational memory category
that assumes that what the organization knows can somehow be remembered and
maintained for future use. One study looked at this body of research and concluded that
the term “organizational memory” had become overworked and may need to be revisited
within the context of the individual (Ackerman & Halverson, 1999). Instead of focusing
on the content or remembering the results (known facts or things on the intranet) along
a particular line of inquiry, the process of how the facts were uncovered may be equally
important.
Finally, there were a number of articles that discussed knowledge management and
repository management of knowledge and information (Croasdell et al., 2003; Davenport,
1998). Building the KM systems, generally happens two ways: (1) a system in which the
artifacts accompany the person, process, and context (termed project-based by Croasdell
et al.) and (2) a system where the “knowledge” is not associated with a specific person
within a context. While these studies did not help define what was meant by core
competencies in the HP case, they were helpful in deciding how the data need to be kept
and shared within the organization. Many of the studies in this category focused on
issues involving methods to capture or create, maintain, categorize, and diffuse knowl-
edge throughout the organization. Since time was of the essence, building a huge
infrastructure to house everything needed to run the 125 systems was not feasible.
In summary, existing research from external sources helped to define some guiding
principles and definitions. First, knowledge has an information component that can be
easily transferred (once it is identified) and even stored in a database, but the “know how”
and/or understanding components of knowledge are more at the heart of a company’s
core competencies. For purposes of this project, knowledge is defined most simply as
information, skills, and abilities in use within the corporation. While information can be
tracked, captured, and defined, knowledge is created and may be organized by different
individuals in different ways. Managing this knowledge, therefore, has an autonomous
characteristic to it that is housed within and, therefore, needs to be owned by individuals.
In this respect, the management of knowledge at the individual level becomes the basis
for what was called an “expertise database.”