Case Study: The Knowledge Management Journey Within ICL

ICL, now Fujitsu, is an international company which focuses on helping its customers ‘. . . seize the opportunities of the information age’. In the early 1990s the organisation began transforming itself away from a computer manufacturing company into a service-led organisation. It was this change which made it a strategic imperative for the organisation to gain leverage from its world-wide intellectual capital.

However, in an organisation that at that time consisted of 22,000 employees, operating in 70 different countries, many of whom were mobile workers, or working on flexible contracts, getting a knowledge management initiative off the ground was not an easy task.

The first knowledge management project was initiated by an informal network of individuals, in the early 1990s. This group came together to address the question of

How can we add true organisational learning to the existing emphasis on training and developing people?

A couple of years later a formal project, Mobilising Knowledge Programme, was established with the support and backing of the then Chief Executive, Keith Todd, as a way of accelerating ICL’s business transformation. The project was headed up by a full-time programme director, responsible for co-ordinating a cross-company knowledge management initiative. It was recognised that at the initial stage of the organisation’s knowledge management journey a separate project team was needed in order to champion the knowledge management approach. However, it was always the intention that managing knowledge was ultimately to become a line management responsibility.

The Mobilising Knowledge project team, consisting of individuals with different skills drawn from different parts of the business, ran a series of focus group discussions with front-line employees to establish what information they needed to do their jobs effectively. This activity yielded some common themes regarding the information needs of individuals. This included information about:

• ICL as a business

• ICL services and customers

• ICL customers and partners

• Processes and policies in use across different parts of the company

• Who the company experts were and how to get in touch with them

• Time-saving tools, such as up-to-date telephone directories and site maps.

The first deliverable for the project team was the introduction of Caf VIK (Valuing ICL Knowledge), which was a web site on the organisation’s intranet. The use of the term Caf was of symbolic importance. Being a global organisation the project team wanted to create a virtual environment that had some of the characteristics and attractions of a physical Caf .

An important feature of the launch of Caf VIK was a series of briefing sessions throughout the organisation. These were no ordinary briefing meetings. Instead the project team used Caf style props to set the scene, so they bought inexpensive caf style tables and chairs and some PCs. After the formal part of the presentation individuals could then gain hands-on experience of exploring Caf VIK and what he had to offer.

Speaking at a Roffey Park seminar, Elizabeth Lank, Programme Director – Mobilising Knowledge, commented that this approach worked really well. Even though ICL is a technology-based company Elizabeth Lank pointed out that the project team came across individuals who were technophobic, thus having support on-hand to help individuals explore what Caf VIK had on offer was a good tactic.

Another important element of the Mobilising Knowledge Programme was the introduction of the ‘New World’ office accommodation programme, where offices where systematically remodelled with far fewer, mostly ‘hot’ desks (about 30 per cent fewer desks in some cases). Private offices were removed too. The first private office to go was that of the Chief Executive. This was a fairly dramatic symbol that change was coming.

With the move to mostly ‘hot-desking’, many more meeting rooms, quiet rooms for solitary working, and comfortable meeting spaces, near coffee machines, were introduced. Coffee and tea were also made free at this point. The message that the organisation wanted to get across was that you don’t come to work to answer e-mails – you can do that when working at home – instead you come to work to do what you can uniquely do at work: meet with and talk to colleagues, discuss work and exchange information.

ICL’s second generation of its intranet was launched at the start of 1999 and was completely built around the idea of communities: providing the same tools for functional business units as for virtual communities of practice. It proved a great success, with the 50 or so communities that were part of the original set-up quickly becoming more than 500 communities within a year, and the majority of ICL’s then 19,000 staff participating in multiple groups. Communities ranged in size from as few as 15 participants to 4000, with most settling around an optimum number of 100–200. By the time of ICL’s full merger with Fujitsu in spring 2002, 500 items of new content were being added to the site every week. There is now a steady stream of volunteered content, much of it high quality.

While local initiatives are important, there is a view that these initiatives then need to be set within a strategic framework (Knight, 2002). A process that involves establishing:

Knowledge Management Drivers And The Link With Organisational Strategy

What are the pressures that the organisation is facing? Why is managing knowledge important to us as a business?

Knowledge Management Strategy

Where do we need to be? What are the key levers for change? These might be a focus on people, processes, leadership, or technology. Some of the common strategic levers for knowledge management include: customer knowledge; knowledge in products and service; knowledge in people; knowledge in processes; organisational memory; knowledge in relationships and knowledge assets (Skyrme, 2001).

Implementation

How do we move forward? Here consideration needs to be given to implementation from a top-down, lateral and bottom-up approach.

Measuring The Results

How are we doing? Here consideration could be given to adopting a balanced scorecard approach, focusing on the four elements of financial, customer, process and future.

As other writers point out it is important that wherever an organisations starts on its knowledge management journey, or wherever the initial focus is placed, it is important to adopt a holistic approach (Probst, Raub and Romhard, 2000). Probst et al. see the core building blocks of knowledge management as:

Knowledge identification – How do we ensure that there is sufficient transparency of external and internal knowledge? How do we help employees to locate the information that they need?

Knowledge acquisition – What forms of expertise should we buy in from outside? Are we making full use of the expertise embedded in the external relationships that we have?

Knowledge development – How can we build new expertise and capabilities?

Knowledge sharing and distribution – How do we get the knowledge to the right places?

Knowledge utilisation – How do we ensure that the knowledge that we have is applied productively for the benefits of the organisation?

Knowledge retention – How do we ensure that we retain the knowledge that we have? How knowledge enabled is the organisation?

Evaluation – How well are we doing on our knowledge management journey? What have been our key successes and failures? Where should we focus our energy going forward?