Hewlett-Packard is a large, successful
company with over $38 billion in 1996
revenues. Its fast annual revenue
growth—approximately 30%—from such a large base
has astounded observers. The company competes in
many markets, including computers and peripheral
equipment, test and measurement devices, electronic
components, and medical devices. It has 112,000
employees and over 600 locations around the world.
HP is known for its relaxed, open culture. All
employees, including the CEO, work in open cubicles.
Many employees are technically-oriented engineers
who enjoy learning and sharing their knowledge. The
company is perceived as being somewhat benevolent
to its employees, and fast growth has obviated the
need for major layoffs. All employees participate in
a profit-sharing program.
The company is also known for its decentralized organizational
structure and mode of operations. Business
units that perform well have a very high degree of
autonomy. There is little organized sharing of information,
resources, or employees across units. HP
managers feel that the strong business-specific focus
brought by decentralization is a key factor in the
firm’s recent success. Although culturally open to
sharing, few business units are willing to invest time
or money in “leveraged” efforts that do not have an
obvious and immediate payback for the unit. It is common, however, for employees to move from
one business unit to another; this mobility makes
possible some degree of informal knowledge transfer
within HP.
In mid-1995 it became apparent that several
knowledge management initiatives were underway in
various HP business units. Some had been in place for
several years; others were just beginning. Noticing
this phenomenon, Bob Walker, HP’s CIO and Vice
President, and Chuck Sieloff, Manager of Information
Systems Services and Technology (ISST), decided to
attempt to facilitate knowledge management at HP
by holding a series of workshops on the topic. Their
idea was to bring together a diverse group of people
within the company who were already doing knowledge
management in some form, or who were interested
in getting started. The corporate ISST group had
previously sponsored similar workshop initiatives in
the areas of reengineering and organizational change
management. Key objectives for the workshops
included the facilitation of knowledge sharing
through informal networking, and the establishment
of common language and management frameworks
for knowledge management. Walker and Sieloff
appointed Joe Schneider, an ISST staff member who
also focused on Web-based systems, to organize
the workshops.
The first workshop was held in October of 1995. An
outside consultant facilitated the meeting, and presented
some proposed definitions and frameworks.
About 20 people attended the first session; 13 were
from corporate units, and the rest from various
business units. Joe Schneider asked participants at
the meeting if they were aware of other knowledge
management initiatives. From this discussion
Schneider compiled a list of more than 20 HP sites
where some form of proactive knowledge management
was underway. Several of the initiatives are
described below.
Trainer’s Trading Post
One knowledge management initiative involves
HP educators. Bruce Karney is a member of the
infrastructure team for the Corporate Education organization,
part of HP’s Personnel function. Karney estimates
that there are more than 2,000 educators or
trainers distributed around HP, most of whom work
within small groups and find it difficult to share
knowledge. About two years ago, in response to complaints
by the education community that “we don’t
know what’s going on,” Karney began work on
approaches to knowledge sharing for HP educators.
He hoped to make the group more of a community;
until this effort, it had no shared history, process, or
tool set.
Using Lotus Notes as the technology vehicle, Karney
established three different “knowledge bases” for
educators to use:
T “Trainer’s Trading Post,” a discussion database on
training topics;
T “Training Library,” a collection of training
documents (e.g., course binders);
T “Training Review,” a “Consumer Reports”
collection of evaluations of training resources.
Training Review never took off; educators were
reluctant to opine online about the worth of course
materials or external providers, and there was no
reward structure for participating. It was therefore
merged with Trainer’s Trading Post. Training Library
did receive many contributions, but as participants
discovered that they could attach materials to submissions
to Trainer’s Trading Post, that knowledge
base became the dominant medium for educator use,
and Karney expects that it will be the sole offering in
the future.
Karney adopted innovative tactics to get submissions
to the knowledge bases. He gave out free Notes
licenses to prospective users. When a new knowledge
base was established, he gave out 3,000 free
airline miles for the first 50 readers and another 500
miles for anyone who posted a submission. Later
promotions involved miles for contributions, for
questions, and for responses to questions. By early
1996, more than two-thirds of the identified educator community had read at least one posting, and more
than a third had submitted a posting or comment
themselves. Still, Karney was frustrated. Despite his
countless attempts with free miles and e-mail and
voice mail exhortations, he still felt the need to
continually scare up fresh contributions. “The participation
numbers are still creeping up,” he notes, “but
this would have failed without an evangelist. Even at
this advanced stage, if I got run over by a beer truck,
this database would be in trouble.”
Building a Network of Experts
Another knowledge project was initiated by the
library function within HP Laboratories, the
company’s research arm. The goal of this project is
to provide a guide to human knowledge resources
within the Labs and, eventually, to other parts of
Hewlett-Packard. If successful, the guide will help to
address a problem identified by a previous director
of the Labs: “If only HP knew what HP knows.”
The directory of HP experts, called Connex, is being
developed by Tony Carrozza, an “Information
Technical Engineer.” He has been working part-time
on the project for almost a year; the system is
scheduled to go into its pilot phase soon. It uses a
Web browser as an interface to a relational database.
The primary content of the database is a set of expert
“profiles,” or guides to the backgrounds and expertise
of individuals who are knowledgeable on particular
topics. By browsing or searching Connex, it will be
easy to find, for example, someone in HP who speaks
German, knows ISDN technology, and has a master’s or PhD in a technical field. Upon finding someone,
the searcher can quickly link to the individual’s home
page if it exists.
One concern Carrozza has is how to create a manageable
list of knowledge categories in the database that
will be widely understood and will accurately reflect
the Labs’ broad universe of knowledge. Carrozza
plans to rely on the experts themselves to furnish
their original knowledge profiles and to maintain
them over time. He expects that this will be a
challenge, and speculated that experts might be given
incentives—for example, Carrozza suggested, “a Dove
Bar for each profile”—to submit and maintain profiles.
As a back-up, a “nag” feature is built into the system
to remind people to update their profiles. Carrozza
also anticipates that there may be problems with the
term “expert”; he is trying to identify less politically
laden terms.
Connex will be implemented initially for the Labs,
but Carrozza hopes that the expert network will eventually
expand throughout all of HP. He knows that
other parts of the company will be developing their
own databases, but he hopes that they will use the
Connex structure. He is already working with the
Corporate Education group described above to create
a network of educators using Connex. He adds, “I
know other people are building expert databases.
I just don’t know who they are.”
Knowledge Management on Product Processes
HP’s Product Processes Organization (PPO) is a corporate
group with the mission of advancing product
development and introduction. It includes such
diverse functions as Corporate Quality, Procurement,
Product Marketing, Safety and Environmental, and
Organizational Change. The Product Generation
Information Systems (PGIS) group serves each of
these functions. Bill Kay, the PPO director, put PGIS
at the center of the PPO organization chart because
he felt that information management needed to
become a core competence of PPO.
As part of that competence, Kay asked Garry Gray,
the manager of PGIS, and Judy Lewis, another PGIS
manager, to begin a knowledge management
initiative. As a “proof of concept” the PPO knowledge
management group developed Knowledge Links, a
Web-based collection of product development knowledge
from the various PPO functions. Consistent with
the philosophy of the knowledge management group,
Knowledge Links contained knowledge contributed
by “knowledge reporters and editors,” who obtained
it through interviews with experts. The system
prototype has been used many times to demonstrate
the concept of knowledge management with PPO
“customers,” but the goal of summarizing knowledge
across PPO proved overly ambitious, and the system
was never built.
The PPO knowledge management group is currently
working on three projects. One involves competitor
information for HP’s Components group. The goal
of the second project is to create a Web-based
interface to primary and secondary research
information. The third system manages international
marketing intelligence. Each of these projects is
being developed in a collaboration between PGIS
and other PPO groups, e.g., Product Marketing and
Change Management. The goal is not for PGIS to manage
knowledge by itself, but rather to facilitate the
process of structuring and disseminating knowledge
through the use of information technology.
Managing Knowledge for the Computer
Dealer Channel
Perhaps one of the earliest initiatives to explicitly
manage knowledge at HP was an effort to capture and
leverage HP product knowledge for the Computer
Products Organization (CPO) dealer channel. It began
in 1985. Technical support for the dealer channel had
previously involved answering phone calls; the business
unit was growing at 40% annually, and calls from
dealers were growing at the same rate. Eventually,
answering all the phone calls would require all the
people in Northern California. HP workers began to
put frequently-asked questions on a dial-up database,
and the number of dealer support calls began to
decline. According to David Akers, who managed the
project, the development group views each support
call as an error.
The system came to be called HP Network News.
It was converted to Lotus Notes and has been
remarkably successful in reducing the number of
calls. One key reason for the system’s effectiveness is
the developers’ close attention to the actual problems
faced by dealers—not their own ideas about what
knowledge is important. Another important factor is
the constant effort by developers to add value to the
knowledge. For example, lists are constantly made of
the most frequently asked questions, frequently
encountered problems, and most popular products.
These lists are publicized and dealers are encouraged
to download the information from the Notes database.
Less valuable information is pruned away. HP
Network News is still going after 10 years, and it has
been a significant factor in the high support ratings
HP receives from its dealers.
Summary
Chuck Sieloff and Joe Schneider are committed to
advancing the state of knowledge management, but in
a decentralized company like Hewlett-Packard, it is
not clear what steps should be taken. They discuss
whether there are actions they could take beyond
facilitating the Knowledge Management Workshop.
They feel that knowledge is already exchanged well
within work groups and even business units, but
there is little support in the culture for sharing across
units. However, for ISST to try to change the culture
just for the purpose of knowledge management seems
like the tail wagging the dog.
Schneider and Sieloff also wonder just how different
managing “knowledge” is from managing information.
Many of the HP initiatives are arguably a mixture of
knowledge and information, and drawing the line
between the two is difficult. Sieloff feels that the
same fact could be either data, information, or
knowledge for different people. Of course, the
various information systems groups at HP have a
great deal of experience at managing data and information.
How relevant is the experience gained in
these areas to problems of knowledge management?
Schneider believes that facilitating knowledge
management at HP can be viewed as a knowledge
management problem. The company has both
internal expertise and external sources of knowledge
on knowledge management. At the corporate level,
Schneider is using the workshops as one mechanism
to understand who needs this knowledge and how
best to transfer it. He also wants to get the workshop
participants involved in an ongoing knowledge
management network that shares best practices and
transfers emerging knowledge.
However, neither Chuck Sieloff nor Joe Schneider has
knowledge management as the only component (or in
Sieloff’s case, even a major component) of his job.
They know that other firms are establishing permanent,
full-time positions overseeing knowledge management
issues at the corporate level—a “Chief
Knowledge Officer,” for example. When Sieloff and
Schneider discuss the concept with regard to HP, they
question whether a corporate knowledge executive
would make sense in such a decentralized company.
The current HP approach, which emphasizes awareness-
building and the development of common
vocabulary and frameworks through workshops,
is a subtle one. The two managers feel it is
appropriate for HP’s culture, but they are always
looking for other techniques and methods that
might be introduced.
