The key concept of the Knowledge Dashboard is to create a place where experience and "knowing how to do something" is easily obtainable.  Knowledge Management attempts to capture all of the wisdom and experience of your employees. Your trading partners and your employees all benefit from having the right information and making the right decisions.

This is the next big thing.

When Electronic Commerce is old news in a few years, businesses will have wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars on this and some companies will have gained significant benefit while the industry undergoes major change. Knowledge Management will be the next wave of "why you need to spend money now." Think back to Captain Kirk on the old Star Trek TV series. The Captain would ask the Enterprise computer anything and he would get exactly the right answer. That is the hope and promise of Knowledge Management. You set up this "computer thing" that captures all of the wisdom and experience of your employees. Your trading partners and your employees all benefit from having the right information and making the right decisions.

IBM, ORACLE, Microsoft, Sun, and a host of others have been making huge investments in Knowledge Management over the past few years. The announcement a couple of months ago on the Microsoft Digital Dashboard represents the first of a series of new products. Over the next several months many new "solutions" will appear on the market.

Like most emerging technology, the short-term hype will be much larger than the reality. We have been spending considerable time and money at Indian River Consulting Group over the last two years trying to get this concept to actually work for us. This article is probably the first time that most MHEDA members will have heard of the subject. Many members may gain some value from our experience and investment.

A Work Design Issue

If you compare where we are on Knowledge Management to medicine, we are at the blood leeching solution level. It will be many years before there is anything to go buy that will provide it. Having said all of this, it IS very powerful and real world impacts can be achieved right now for lots less than the cost of an E-Commerce catalog. The problem is that it is not really a technology issue; it is a work design issue. The technology requirement is minimal and most organizations have at least part of it in place now. It requires some kind of intranet or extranet on a client server network with employee workstations (usually PCs) that provide high-speed access to the Web. Basically all the technology tools can be purchased at Staples or Office Depot.

With this infrastructure in place, the real task becomes one of defining processes. In most cases the work must be done by mid to senior level executives because they are the ones with real experience-driven "scar tissue" and wisdom. This represents about 80% of the work to get real business impact.

The other key task is the involvement of a real professional database engineer to set up a data structure that collects and supports information developed in the process definition piece.

Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton are really smart guys who are on the forefront of research on this subject. They have written, "Dumping technology on a problem is rarely an effective solution." When knowledge is transferred by stories and gossip instead of solely through formal data systems, it comes along with information about the process that was used to develop that knowledge. When just reading reports or seeing presentations, people don't learn about the subtle nuances of work methods-- the failures, the tasks that were fun, the tasks that were boring, the people who were helpful, and the people who undermined the work. Formal systems can't store knowledge that isn't easily described or codified, but is nonetheless essential for doing work, called tacit knowledge. So, while firms keep investing millions of dollars to set up knowledge management groups, most of the knowledge that is actually used and useful is transferred by the stories people tell to each other, by the trials and errors that occur as people develop knowledge and skill, by experienced people providing close and constant coaching to newcomers."

Think of knowledge in two categories: explicit and tacit. Explicit is the hard data, but tacit is the high impact stuff. Laura Empson is also a major contributor in the field and she summed up the issue by saying, "The primary goal of knowledge management systems is to identify the valuable knowledge that resides within individuals and disseminate it throughout the organization. However, experience suggests that this seemingly straightforward process is, in practice, fraught with difficulties.

There are issues with employees being willing to share what they perceive as their job security. There are huge issues with the cost of capturing the information, and then there is the problem of "on demand" retrieval. There are working solutions to these problems if an organization is looking for practical benefits and not a perfect solution.

Effective performance by team members is linked to their individual experience and knowledge. In most organizations this is provided by the "school of hard knocks." Every "at school" experience either creates a customer service failure or a sub-optimized profit event for the work group. If these costs were collected as a single line on an income statement, the amount would be quite large.

Three Parts of Knowledge Management

Imagine three interrelated parts that create Knowledge Management. The central piece is a robust and scalable database that stores all the information and experience. Second, an ever-changing and expanding input tool gathers information from many sources to place in the database. The last piece is the tool that users use to get the knowledge out of the database. It is called a Knowledge Dashboard.

The Dashboard is essentially an employee's personal home page on an intranet that contains everything that they need to do their job. Even the old, standard green screen is listed as a hotlink on their page (Transaction Engine below). A freedom in Knowledge Management is the ability to leave your legacy system alone. When the green screen link is selected, keyboard data goes to the old computer on an $80 IRMA Interface board. Your legacy system thinks that the PC is a dumb terminal. The table below lists some typical hot link categories for use by a distributor sales rep.

If the sales rep can get to the web, they can get to their dashboard. Notice the Search Engine button. Every email, memo, report, spreadsheet and other document in your company has been indexed and is retrievable by keyword, just like in the bigger outside World Wide Web.

Notice the up arrow from the Dashboard to the Constant Input box. As employees use their Dashboards, they "leave tracks" that are routed through the input section to the database for later use. This concept of leaving tracks is how real companies get information without individuals needing to take time to write it down. This is from a field of study called unobtrusive measures. Let's take the example of a phone call between a sales rep and a customer.

The system knows the date, time, and who is online. If Caller ID is used, the system even knows who is at the other end and how long the conversation lasted. This requires using the TAPI interface in Windows NT, a $200 card, and a headset. If stock availability is mapped, then the system knows what products were of interest to the customer based on inquiries made by the rep during the call. Each user has a custom pull down call report menu and Manufacturer list. After the call, the sales rep clicks on the pull down menus to select the type of call they just had and then they click on the Manufacturer button to list the specific product that was discussed. What was just described is a customer contact event and all of this data is stored by event. The sales rep can even add comments if they wish. An example from the real world is a customer who always wants to haggle on price so the sales rep quotes a higher than normal price so the discount generates the right margin.

The value of this approach is driven by the need for every employee to log every call with every customer. The current infatuation with Customer Relationship Management still looks at the sales force and leaves out collaboration with the entire team.

Another example of finessing valuable data out of a system like this is the Automatic Lost Sales Posting Program. A small Visual Basic "keyboard trap" program logs any event where a sales rep checks stock and "Available to Sell" is zero, and then emails the event to purchasing for corrective action.

These examples illustrate a guiding principle that is critical to success:

Design the database to capture everything forever and fight hard for every scrap of information that can be obtained without asking any user to input anything.

Tacit Knowledge Development

The "tacit knowledge" for your group is developed from three interrelated sources. The first is information from outside your business, like research and subscription services, that feed data into the database on your customers and competitors. An experienced sage or domain expert reviews this content as it comes in daily on a sage dashboard, adding relevance and impact for use by your team. This is an important distinction. Many companies have huge research databases, but they lack a structured process that lets a smart person add impact for others in a timely and cost effective manner.

The second source of this wisdom and knowledge comes from your employees having "expert on demand" or "consultant in a can" access to get a real answer or explanation to a specific problem. This information is about how and why, not what. Most line managers only have time for the what. One tip on this subject is that when we are getting requests for information or advice we will always ask first, "Which is more important, speed of response, or depth of response." Another tip is that this is a great part time job for retiring employees who can coach and at the same time build a large list of FAQ responses. We have been surprised with how well email works (captured in the database for future use) for why and how questions.

The third source of this wisdom is peer-to-peer interactions. Credit managers can ask other credit managers about people problems and anything else of interest, even how to really manage their boss. One really big warning belongs here - managers must allow a portion of this to be private, a place where managers cannot go. We have found that this is a rock hard rule. If violated, it won't be used to build tacit knowledge.

Industry Relevance

Does this subject have relevance in the material handling industry? Each company needs to make their own call. Consider a couple of hard facts. Rental rates are being set and changed very quickly by inexperienced people. Product liability issues have huge cost impacts and "I don't know" is not a defense. Costs are rising and margins are dropping throughout the industry. Some companies will win or lose on the effectiveness of their product support efforts to extend useful life.

I wonder if it would make a difference if employees could become experienced faster while making fewer mistakes during the process? I wonder if their work would be more fun and interesting and maybe we could then do a better job keeping them.

IRCG is an experienced based firm specializing in Distribution. Started in 1987 by J. Michael Marks, IRCG has specialists who consult with distributors and suppliers to make the changes necessary to maintain competitive advantage. You can contact them by calling 321-956-8617, or visit www.ircg.com for more information.

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