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Sea Change

September 18, 2003
By David Joachim

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Private Lessons

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	In this article
	Introduction
	Career Builder
	Private Lessons
	Bigger Plans
	On Location, Series 4
	Vital Stats
	Army-Navy Game
	Lt. Eric Morris
	Capt. Fred S. Bertsch III (ret)
	Chris Piereman

Experts point out that the best private sector KM practices are in many ways rooted in process methodologies pioneered by the U.S. military. "The Army and the Navy practically invented the way that most enterprises collaborate today, and it's in full view in the current conflict in Iraq," says Carla O'Dell, president of the American Productivity and Quality Center, a nonprofit research organization whose members include the Army and Navy.

There's a structured process at the end of each engagement: Squads compare what was supposed to happen with what actually happened, and from there they recommend new tactics. Reports from dozens of squads are uploaded to the Center for Army Lessons Learned in Levenworth, Kan., and new rules of engagement are drafted.

O'Dell sees a role for both open debate and authoritarianism within the armed forces' KM efforts. "The process to reach the decision is collaborative. Once it's reached, it's hierarchically enforced," she says. "That's what I want my armed forces to do."

Morris admits that at some point he needs to impose more rules and policies on NKO, not only to protect classified information but also to improve the quality of postings. As many early adopters in the private sector have learned, information without quality controls is just noise.

Most private-sector KM adopters assign gatekeepers, who verify the technical accuracy of messages before they are posted, O'Dell says. A second option is to put quality control in the hands of users by letting them rate tips that are exchanged on the portal. Better placement goes to highly rated tips. Even without a weighting system, users ultimately create their own filter by discounting the opinions of users whose posts have been wrong before, Kantner says.

Not About Technology

In a way, NKO is a technology project that de-emphasizes technology. Sure, the NKO team must worry about making NKO easy to use and always available, or no one would rely on it. But those involved in the project describe NKO as 1 percent about technology and 99 percent about people.

And it's more than rhetoric. On a function-by-function basis, IBM would have beat Appian as the portal vendor hands down, Morris says. But feature richness wasn't the priority--speed of implementation was, because the NKO team had a point to make to those who might try to abort the portal's launch. The tight budget was also a factor--KM software from IBM's Lotus division would have been much more expensive, though Morris wouldn't specify the price difference.

The Navy also gets to influence future revisions of the Appian portal software. In addition to the teams of Appian staffers assigned to Navy bases, the Navy has access to developers at the vendor's Vienna, Va., headquarters. They respond to feedback and make changes on request, and they even recommend their own enhancements.

For example, when users complained that they didn't want to log on separately to legacy training portals that predated NKO, Appian developed an auto login that signs users on to all systems. The next revision of Appian's portal software, version 3.0, will incorporate several Navy-inspired functions, including grouping users based on more specific attributes for better personalization and creating private, invitation-only communities.

Such partnerships are becoming commonplace among collaboration-software vendors, particularly those focused on expertise location, such as AskMe Corp. and Tacit Knowledge Systems, O'Dell says. In return for low prices and personal attention, the vendors gain experience in how people use their products.

Indeed, in the end even the vendor choice came down not to technology but to the responsiveness of its people. "Ninety percent of the complaints I get, if Appian can fix it, they're all over it," says Preissler, who heads NKO's "IT community" of 400 personnel. "It's like they have a group of folks sitting there, waiting for us to give them something to do. I'll say, I wish NKO could do this, and a few weeks later, boom, it works."

Preissler, who trolls NKO at least four hours per day and always has it running in the background, has seen heated discussions on his boards, with Navy IT personnel pointing out that there are better collaboration tools out there. They may be right, Preissler says, but they miss the point. "My objective isn't to find the best tool. It's to reach out to the communities," he says. "If we were to chase the best technology all the time, we would be constantly changing tools."