Dialog: Running Light One-On-One

Suneeth Nayak is VP of Technology at Information Management Consultants (IMC), located in Tyson's Corner, Virginia. IMC provides a wide range of IS planning, development and implementation services, with core competencies in delivering workflow and document management solutions for federal and corporate customers.

In last week's Dialog, we talked with IMC about their value proposition and vision of KM. This week, we return to IMC to learn about how the company is internalizing KM through their Solutions Depot and how other companies can encourage organizational learning through creating these and other centers.

RL:  Many organizations are working to institutionalize organizational learning initiatives. These have sometimes taken the form of corporate universities, centers of excellence, or technology demonstration labs. Tell me about the mission of your Solutions Depot.

SN:  Our Solutions Depot is a technology center and one of a suite of initiatives within the organization. We also have special interest groups, which are formally blessed informal gatherings. While the company is not dictating either form or content of these events, it does provide a during-work-hours, recognized billable opportunity for the staff to come together in information groups, organized by interest area. We have a group that specializes in database issues, another group that specializes in client development issues, a group that specializes in inter- and intranet issues, security issues, networking issues, etc. All of these groups represent communities of interest.

Even if you are not formally charged with network design issues, you are free to participate in the conversation, to learn from your peers, to hear case studies, and gather technology alerts as new beta software comes into the organization or as people learn through playing around with new capabilities. This is a forum in which people who are proud of what they're doing have an opportunity to have part of their 15 minutes by stepping into the spotlight and sharing their experiences with their peers.

RL:  Some companies call such informal gatherings a waste of time. Is this time really billable? Is it really contributing to value? How do you know that it is successful?

SN:  We believe, independent of any metric, that these activities are going to add value to the company. If it is true about a service or a consulting organization that your people are your greatest assets, then this is going to add to the asset value of the organization. So how can you argue that anything that improves your staff does not add value to the organization?

But that hasn't been said. I perceive that organizations that are attempting to walk this path have to be aware that there are two stages. There is a stage where you are investing. Where the tangible benefits will not be realized instantly because there is a certain amount of organizational inertia, and there is a certain learning curve that has to be overcome before the benefits start to accrue. There is a certain period of time where you have to do these things on faith. But once you get past that stage, what we're seeing is the ability of our developers to share best practices and our analysts to start asking questions that might not necessarily be obvious.

Our ability as an organization to document those practices and those issues and methodology concerns is increasing geometrically because as the organization sensitizes to these issues we become more capable of capturing and documenting them and conveying them to practitioners as they join various problem spaces.

RL:  How did this get started?

SN:  One of the ways IMC has demonstrated its commitment to learning is by allowing a space for both our staff and our customers to understand the implications of the various and dramatically changing technologies that are available for use. We provided a Solutions Depot where these technologies are demonstrated, either stand-alone or in the context of various solutions, to give people a sense of the impact that they might bring to their business problems or their technology issues.

Originally the Solutions Depot was instituted to allow us to explore the issues of open development in information systems. We had a number of interoperability experiments and protocols that we would run against production projects: what happens if the client changed their technology decisions? If they came up with a different approach, what are some of the risks and costs associated in commiting to certain technologies?

Over time, as those issues have become less and less significant both to the business and to the developers, as standards have evolved and people have been insulated from those sorts of risks and issues, the Solution Depot's mission has evolved as well. Currently, we are looking to use the Solutions Depot as a core repository for information on IMC solutions and IMC uses of technology, again both for internal as well as for our audience to convey the successes and failures in our engagements.

We are very strongly committed to the notion that the successful management of our information and knowledge assets calls for two critical things. It calls for will, and it calls for trust. Will is represented in a variety of forms: from the commitment on the part of senior management, to building the right facilities, to initiatives like our special interest groups, right down to the participation of the newest staff member in those kinds of opportunities. Trust is to tell the truth in those contexts, that it is important not merely to articulate how you succeeded and where you succeeded but what dead ends were followed. Where did you fail? You need to help your colleagues not to recapitulate those failures when they're faced with similar circumstances.

RL:  So, failure is seen as part of the learning process, as something acceptable?

SN:  Absolutely. Learning implies that you're going to fail occasionally. Now, failing gracefully is one of the measures of success as an employee of the organization:  alerting people that you're at risk when you identify that risk, alerting people that that risk seems to be materializing, coming up with contingency plans that are appropriate and executing those crisply, are all part of the process. We don't want our customers to have to suffer from our failures, but we also understand that if you're not falling down you're probably not learning to ski. So it's very important for our staff to have the freedom to try things, to be a little daring, to come up with the kind of aggressive advanced solutions that we think our customers expect of us.

RL:  What are the success factors that make this happen. What allows for this kind of climate?

SN:  A lot of it has to do with our systems integration heritage. We don't look at problems as something that we are going to sit down and solve by brute force. We look for opportunities to coordinate other peoples' solutions into something that is greater than the sum of the parts. Also, our organization has a very strong emphasis on the educational component of our professional lives on our lives. There's a real commitment to education both internally sponsored, externally provided, and general education in the form of continuing college and graduate opportunities. Some of these behaviors carry down from the top, and the fact that those things are valued at the most senior levels of the organization does shape the way project managers, team leaders, and even staff view their interactions with their customers, their interactions with each other, and their interactions with technology