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Preparing for Conversations with Stan Garfield: Choosing Connection vs. Collection, Open vs. Closed, Practical vs. Theoretical
Stan Garfield, KM Leader, Engagement Knowledge Management Initiative, Hewlett-Packard
January, 2006
By Jerry Ash
Introduction
While doing a case report for Inside Knowledge magazine on HP's Engagement Knowledge Management initiative, I became so impressed with Stan Garfield I'm still writing about him. In my 'last word' column for the February issue I'm using Stan Garfield as 'the dream candidate' when making up the job description for the ideal KManager. I'm also saying there's only one Stan Garfield with 22 years experience and practice in the journey of DEC, Compaq and HP that led to today's Hewlett-Packard KM program.
Biography
Because Stan's personal journey was so integral to the convergence of the three companies, I wrote this sidebar, which is quite different than most biographies:
Personal success story
Individual journey through multiple mergers assures KM continuity and growth
Stan Garfield's personal journey through the convergent journeys of Digital Equipment Corporation, Compaq, and Hewlett-Packard is a story of individual passion and intellectual capital at work.
"I have always been interested in communication and in sharing information," Garfield says.
In elementary school he published a one-page newsletter. In high school he operated a radio station. In college he enrolled as a journalism student but got hooked on computer programming and transferred to an engineering school.
His work as a technician involved writing applications for speech and hearing research, for cardiac catheterization and on to developing operating systems and compilers. But technology did not bury his love for the human side of business.
"I wanted to become a manager," Garfield says, "so I took a job managing the computer operations at St. Louis University Medical School which had the first Tandem computer in St. Louis."
When he moved to Digital in 1983 it was with a strong background in technology and management and a continuing love for personal communication and knowledge sharing. He was soon ahead of KM's 'time.' As a manager at Digital he compiled information useful to his team members that included key contact lists and pointers to reference material. The key contacts list became one of the most popular documents at Digital since it was essentially the yellow pages of the company.
A service called Reader's Choice was launched at Digital and Garfield used it to manage subscriptions to the key contacts list and numerous newsletters he published. He had gone full circle from journalist to a techie and back to journalist again. He eventually had over 30,000 subscribers to his various periodicals at Digital. He used Digital's VAXnotes as a tool for collaboration, communication and Q&A. By 1995 the Internet was starting to blossom and Digital developed its own intranet. Garfield became editor of the Digital Professional Services Intranet.
By the time Digital launched its KM programme in 1996, the choice of a leader was obvious--Stan Garfield, of course. He added to his experience and natural instinct for KM by visiting the Center for Business Knowledge run by Ernst & Young in Cleveland.
"I slowly built the Digital KM programme," he recalls, "but it took awhile to get critical mass, management attention and field support. I built a virtual team of early adopters, representatives from each of the organizations, and a few core team members."
In 1998 Compaq bought Digital. Compaq did not have much of a KM programme and so Garfield's programme became the one used by the new systems integration organisation. In 2000 he was asked to help create a corporate KM strategy for Compaq but not much was accomplished before the Compaq/HP merger was announced. After managing projects in the merger 'clean room,' Garfield took charge of KM for HP Services Consulting & Integration, first in the Americas, and then worldwide.
So there you have the story behind the story-the power of personal knowledge management combined with corporate knowledge management to produce the best possible outcome in the midst of major organisational change.
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Pre-Dialogue Remarks
By Stan Garfield
I would like to invite discussion on these three topics:
Connection versus collection-asking for help at the time of need as opposed to collecting documents in advance of a specific need. Bruce Karney calls this "demand-driven KM." Connection involves using communities and social networks to request knowledge in response to a specific requirement. Collection involves capturing contributions to repositories which can later be searched at the time of need. Both connection and collection are useful, but how much should each be emphasized in a KM program?
Open versus closed access to knowledge - should knowledge be openly and widely shared or tightly controlled and locked down? Some people want to narrowly restrict community membership and limit access to repositories to members of a specific business, region, or type of employee. Others would like to include everyone who can possibly contribute to a community, and allow repository access to any employee of the company. What are the pros and cons of each approach?
Practical versus theoretical KM - down-to-earth discussion on real-world problems and solutions. Comments on previous STAR series have included:
"I've found the AOK discussions to be awfully theoretical for the last few weeks, so I hope you can bring them back to Earth."
"Most of us do not work in organizations and with people that would respond positively to comments that include such terminology as concept mapping, intellectual capital, narrative repositories, and knowledge management. . . . Real world businesses are focused on the bottom line, how to get where they are going as quickly as they can so that they can produce their service/product for a customer profitably. . . . Translate your insights into everyday speak and lose the jargon. So you tell me, what will all this upper level, esoteric conversation do for me when I go to work on Monday?"
In Tom Stewart's "The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization" (former STAR Series moderator and continuing member), chapter 5, pages 85-87, the following key elements of a KM program are defined based on the experience of Steve Denning (former moderator and still member) at the World Bank:
communities of practice
place (online presence for the communities)
help desk
Yellow Pages (who-knows-what directory)
primer (FAQ)
knowledge artifacts (records of previous projects, emphasizing best practices and lessons learned)
bulletin board
doorway (a provision for outside access)
Do AOK members agree with this list, and if so, how many of the eight elements have been implemented within their organizations? If not, what additions or deletions do you suggest? Please relate some practical examples of what is working for you and what has been tried in the past and did not work. What are you planning to try next that will improve your business results?
Regards,
Stan
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Case Report, Inside Knowledge magazine
Capture and reuse
HP Engagement KM initiative balances people, process and technology
By Jerry Ash
The subject of knowledge capture and reuse has always created tension in the KM community because it carries visions of IT-driven knowledge repositories, choking with documents difficult to find and lacking in relevance to the searcher. Thus, knowledge capture and reuse has often been given short shrift in a KM initiative.
Part of the inattention to capture and reuse may also be political. The KM community has been on constant defense against software providers who hijacked knowledge management in the beginning with the promotion of information management products wearing the 'emperor's new clothes'-the KM label-without covering the fact they provided nothing more than information retrieval technology with a new label.
That scenario has caused many KM architects to give cautious or little attention to one of the most powerful prospects in the knowledge arsenal-the reuse of existing knowledge.
The situation has been further compounded by KM's gravitation toward the social side of knowledge management with an emphasis on the use of 'knowledge on the hoof' through various types of social networks-powerful tools in themselves but not alternatives to the capture and reuse of codified knowledge.
Organizations that attempt to get their arms around both tacit and explicit knowledge do face real challenges in keeping the balance among the KM domains of people, process and technology. Capture and reuse is perhaps the biggest of those challenges.
This report tells the unlikely story of a technology company's initiative to establish a full scope, mission-driven programme balancing people, process and technology to increase the reuse of both explicit and tacit knowledge from consulting engagements to improve the win rate, drive down sales and delivery costs, and increase engagement quality.
It's HP's Engagement KM (EKM) initiative.
Stan Garfield leads the worldwide knowledge management programme for HP Services Consulting & Integration. His personal journey through the mergers and acquisitions of Digital Equipment Corporation, Compaq and HP is a veritable history of the maturing of KM programs through three organizations (see sidebar).
"The challenge for a KM programme in a technology company is to keep technology in balance with people and process," he says. "That is the direction I have provided. "We have made progress in the past 10 years but we are still facing some of the same challenges. Our goal is to embed KM in our business processes so that it is transparent but we are not there yet."
Not yet there, but well on the way, and using the Engagement KM capture and reuse initiative as the foundation.
The Legacy
The modern HP is the result of a series of mergers and acquisitions that first joined Digital Equipment Corporation with Compaq and then Compaq with HP.
Digital was one of the earliest pioneers of knowledge management with the development of a collaboration tool in mid-1980s called VAXnotes. The tool was well ahead of the general acceptance of the term 'KM' as a management concept. The term 'community of practice' hadn't yet been coined, but Patti Anklam, a former Digital employee, recalls that the master list of conferences at Digital in the mid-80s included 'communities of purpose,' 'communities of practice' and 'communities of interest.' Debra M. Amidon, also with Digital in the early years, remembers that in 1987 Digital and the Technology Transfer Society co-sponsored the first conference in the US focused on knowledge beyond the theories of artificial intelligence - Managing the Knowledge Asset into the 21st Century.
In 1996, both Digital and HP began their own KM programs; and so, when HP merged with Compaq in 2002, it brought together two companies with strong knowledge-based histories.
It was through this heritage that HP ended up with several knowledge management programs in various business units, including the one for HP Services Consulting & Integration now headed by Stan Garfield; he joined Digital in 1983, launched Digital's first knowledge management programme in 1996, helped develop the corporate KM strategy for Compaq, and was part of the Merger & Integration Clean Room which did the planning for the integration of Compaq and HP.
The situation
Both Compaq and HP had mature knowledge management history and programs in place at the time of the merger, and integrating them was challenging. When Garfield took over the Consulting & Integration KM programme in 2004, he inherited those challenges. After eight years of KM, the HP programme had skewed toward technology implementation and content migration from one system to another. The people and process sides of KM had been underemphasized, and as a result, the KM programme was not viewed as supporting the business.
That would have to change. The Consulting & Integration business unit was where KM could do its most valuable work, with 10,000 consultants worldwide and ongoing responsibilities to:
achieve and sustain an acceptable level of profitability,
improve the win rate so that revenue would steadily increase, and
improve project delivery so that its customers were satisfied and ready to buy more services.
Before the Engagement KM programme, Garfield recalls, consultants had no systematic way to find out what had been done before. As a result, the same mistakes were made repeatedly. For example, a mail migration project once underestimated the amount of effort needed for implementation. Having made this mistake before, future projects should have been able to avoid repeated instances by incorporating lessons learned in the writing of future bids. But in fact, two subsequent bids made the same mistake and each of the three projects lost money as a result.
"Any time a new bid raised the question 'Where have we done this type of project before?' a mad scramble would ensue, usually involving mass emails," Garfield recalls. If the question were 'How many of these projects have we done?' we would often have to guess.
Consultant culture
There is a pervasive cultural conflict with the idea of capture and reuse at HP where the company tagline on its logo is 'Invent.' "We have to remind people not to reinvent, Garfield says, "but to invent only when absolutely necessary." Surveys show that HP consultants perceive many of their projects as 'new' and therefore unable to reuse content from previous projects. "If this is true," Garfield challenges, "then we should question why we are selling so many projects with unproven solutions. If it is not true, then our consultants are not searching the knowledge base first."
There are stories aplenty about Big 8/6/5 consultancies and other major consulting firms, which adopted KM as a product but never succeeded in getting their own consultants to participate in knowledge sharing. Most recently, in an issue of Inside Knowledge (Volume 9, Issue 2), Kent Greenes told the story of how he had been hired as a 'rainmaker' to sell and provide KM consulting services for SAIC but only now, after five years, has the company allowed him to develop a formal corporate KM programme for the company.
"In our case," Garfield says, "we have not tried to sell KM products and services very much, but we do have trouble getting consultants to share what they know." At HP, he says it's a paradox. "Everyone acknowledges we should share and reuse knowledge," he says. "However, actual progress has always been limited by the fact that the overriding priority for consultants and their managers is selling the next deal and keeping billable."
Thus the frequent lament: "I know I should be using KM, but I just don't have time."
"The fact that they could save time by using KM escapes them and the managers in the organisation don't insist on it," Garfield says, "so there is always an effort to get increased participation.
"We have talked for years about changing our culture to knowledge-sharing, but I think it is very hard to change a culture," Garfield says. "For example, if a consultant's manager asks every week whether he is going to be billable that week, and doesn't ask anything else, the consultant quickly figures out that all that matters is being billable. If consultants are never asked to demonstrate how they participate in a community or what content they submitted to a repository, they assume it's not really that important."
Re-launch strategy
A knowledge management strategy based on capture and reuse could forecast a programme that would focus primarily on document management- no change, really, from the current system. But Garfield saw an opportunity to use capture and reuse in a much broader and deeper way. To be successful, he knew he needed an architecture that consultants would see as a great tool to help them produce client proposals that would make them billable-not a time-consuming secondary activity but the framework for the work at hand-producing successful bids and satisfied clients. That's the way Garfield would change the culture.
"Re-launching the KM programme under the banner of Engagement KM in 2004 allowed us to introduce the proper balance between people, process, and technology and to focus on meeting business needs," Garfield says. "By setting measurable goals for the programme in participation, capture, reuse, quality, and employee satisfaction, and reporting progress to the executive team on a monthly basis, we changed the perception of the programme and gained the sponsorship of the senior executive."
The re-launch involved a 10-point strategy:
Balance people, process, and technology with a project leader for each category.
Put a strong leader in place; adjust the team to have only strong members, and add team members and offshore resources for specific projects to increase the flow of deliverables.
Establish a governance and collaboration process to engage all regions and practices, and to formally manage and communicate on all projects.
Communicate regularly through newsletters, training, web sites, and local events.
Get the senior executive to communicate regularly about the importance of the programme.
Hold a worldwide face-to-face meeting of KM leaders to get everyone informed, energized, and collaborating.
Engage with other KM programs, both within HP and external, to share ideas and practice what we preach.
Participate in the corporate Knowledge and Intranet Management (KIM) Strategic Leadership Team to help influence IT direction.
Kill off low-priority technologies, and turn over the important ones to the corporate KIM team to free our team for new initiatives.
Focus on three basic goals, and stick to the basics - participate in a community, collaborate on projects using team spaces, and search for and submit project profiles.
The Engagement KM architecture is built around the three domains of People, Process and Technology (fig. 1). The domains do not comprise an organisational structure but, rather, the components of the KM environment. To assure that the programme does not focus primarily on technology, each of the domains has a strong leader.
EKM people
To assure the domains work together, the strong domain leaders work as a team. Projects regularly overlap among the categories but one team member is assigned as the leader for each project based on the nature of the work. The project leader is expected to collaborate with the leaders of the other domains on a regular basis.
The domain leaders plus one regional KM lead and one practice KM lead comprise the Core Team. The Core Team plus two other regional KM leads and three country KM leads form a KM Operations Team. Finally, a worldwide KM Leads Team is composed of about 100 people who have KM roles, primarily in HP Services.
Four direct reports are full-time KM positions. KM regional leads are full-time people whose jobs include substantial KM responsibilities. Most country leads are volunteers but with recognition of their KM responsibilities written into their full-time job descriptions.
Whether by control or influence, Garfield plays an active role in recruiting strong leaders throughout. He ensures that his direct reports are strong leaders through the hiring process. He ensures strong leaders are in place in the regions and practices by influencing their managers. The KM Core and KM Operations Teams are governed by Garfield. The KM Leads Team is open to anyone at HP who wishes to join. Currently the team includes country KM leads, consulting and integration practice KM leads, and representatives from Managed Services, Technology Services, Presales, the Professions programme, Strategic Proposal Centers, HPS Advanced Technology Group, HPS Engagement Program Management Office and the Global Delivery India Center.
"For the core team I select strong leaders who can work collaboratively. For KM Operations I look for field and headquarters leaders who are the most active and creative. For KM Leads I reach out to as many prospects as possible and invite them to join. I work hard to ensure the biweekly calls are lively and feature good guest speakers. I moderate the associated discussion forum to ensure there are postings every week. I publish a weekly newsletter with links to timely and practical information, and a monthly one-page newsletter to keep people informed on programme progress."
Most of the connections between teams are virtual but the second worldwide face-to-face meeting was held in March 2005, with travel expenses being picked up by senior executive sponsors. Bruce Karney (The Knowledge, Inside Knowledge, Volume 9, Issue 2) planned the meeting which included presentations, knowledge sharing, birds of a feather sessions, workshops, breakouts and dinner every night. "Attendees viewed it as a huge success, since many of them had never met face-to-face before," Garfield says.
EKM process
Changing culture is a long and arduous task and companies cannot wait for nature to take its course in a rapidly changing marketplace. One of the greatest challenges to KM is to 'get there' before the culture does. Garfield has woven knowledge capture and reuse into the engagement process to make that happen.
The most successful of the processes is the HP Customer Engagement Road Map which is not just a KM tool but the tool everyone must use during a client engagement from opportunity creation to delivery. It is the process, the way people work. It is the basis of the Engagement Knowledge Map found on the HP Knowledge Network homepage which is a kind of portal through which people work. The Knowledge Network is a collection of tools, processes and people based on knowledge HP and others have accumulated through experience and learning.
The Engagement Knowledge Map is a grid of steps and resources necessary to carry out a client engagement. Down the left side column are resources for documents, templates and source codes. It includes collaborative tacit and explicit resources-team spaces, HP market research, practice portals and communities, a project profile repository and knowledge briefs (white papers).
Across the top of the grid are five categories: opportunity creation, opportunity evaluation, development and bid, negotiate and close, and deliver.
"People do follow the roadmap because it is integrated into the process" Garfield says. It's up to someone during Solution Opportunity Approval & Reviews (SOAR) to ask, "What are you reusing in this bid?" If the answer is "none" then the question becomes "Why are you even bidding on this if you don't even know if we've ever done this before?"
Collaborative Team Spaces provided by the KM programme provide another work process enabler that integrates KM into the process.
All HP engagements require project teams which may or may not be easily assembled in one space. To solve the problem and seize an opportunity to embed KM further in the process, a tool has been developed for assisting teams in setting up online team spaces in a couple of minutes. That's right, an online collaborative space in two minutes. Teams don't have to do it from scratch. The page is a template already populated with things the team will need. The team space is portal-like, but a collaborative place for team members to work. The team can tailor the page to its own needs.
"There's no problem getting people to use this tool," Garfield says. "The team spaces are powerful and they've really caught on. We don't have to 'sell it' because people love it."
While compliance on the team collaboration side of the equation is hugely successful, only partial success has been attained so far on the capture and reuse sides. At its best, the HP Knowledge Capture and Reuse Process (see fig. 2) flows through a collaboration environment to the reuse stage assured by the Knowledge Map and on to capturing reusable content from each engagement. Unlike reuse, however-which is integrated into the SOAR process-capture is not so rigidly controlled.
"Knowledge capture is a company mandate," Garfield says, "But the HP culture is such that mandates don't necessarily get done. Everyone agrees with knowledge capture and knows its value but there are different levels of compliance. In the worse case, nothing gets done. Most cases, however, end up somewhere in the middle.
The desired level of capture occurs in some cases." Capture of lessons learned, Garfield says, is still at the lower level. He is not discouraged that the HP Knowledge Capture and Reuse initiative has not yet reached its full potential. "We are at Stage 4 in the APQC Road Map for programme development which puts us at the 'Expand and Support' level."
EKM Technology
The tech leader serves as liaison from the KM Core Team to the HP IT organisation and coordinates all IT development and support for knowledge management. He is responsible for the technology used in the Knowledge Network including: search, community portals, threaded discussion forums, collaborative team spaces, project profile repository, project documentary library, contribution wizard and usage reporting.
By having an IT specialist as part of the Engagement KM Core Team, better communication and understanding between the user group and the IT department is assured. The 'KM techie' understands how the user group works and is able to better communicate the type of support needed.
Here are the top three tech priorities for fiscal year 2006:
Stabilize the infrastructure
Improve ease of use of tools
Implement one innovation each quarter
Clearly, KM is no longer being driven by the IT department at HP Services but supported by IT in collaboration with the KM program's IT leader. There is little chance now that KM at HP Services will again be skewed toward technology, but there is a relationship in place that assures technology will provide the right support system for the KM programme.
Learn more
There is much more to the HP Services story than you've learned here. There are many more components to the KM Engagement initiative as well as the overall HP KM programme.
To learn more, see the 61 slides Garfield used in his presentation to the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC) in May, 2005. These detailed slides include key P&L and operational indicators, the HP customer engagement roadmap, the knowledge network components, the roles of HP knowledge advisors not mentioned in this report and many screen shots showing how to create team spaces, project profile repository, project profile submission form, knowledge briefs, community portals and distribution lists, a practice community portal, HP forums, publications and a virtual classroom for webinars and more.
From the legacy of KM programs in three companies and a single manager who pulled it all together during 22 years in all three companies, HP Services has one of the most mature and effective programs on the planet.
Dialogue
Additional posts included in a chapter from Next Generation Knowledge Management Volume III
Resources
The Camelot of collaboration, (IK/Knowledge Management, Volume 5, Issue 2). Patti Anklam, a former Digital employee now at Hutchinson Associates, Harvard, MA, US
Debra Amidon, formerly at Digital, CEO, Entovation International
Slide presentation, Stan Garfield, APQC, May, 2005
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