Ask and Ye Shall Receive

A very simple form of expertise sharing was very successful at Company X. We used a process called the knowledge-sharing request, which was an email sent to me with a simple request along the lines of "has anyone ever done this before?" or "has anyone solved this problem before?" or "does anyone know how to do this?" I would forward the message to all consulting managers in the worldwide organization. In almost all cases, several useful replies would be received within a few hours. It was a good example of Dave Snowden's principle that people will almost always help each other at the time of a specific need. Indeed, we had much more success with these ad hoc requests than we did with trying to get people to submit formal project experience documentation.

The Camelot of Collaboration

Expertise sharing regressed at Company X from the time I joined in 1983 until it was acquired by Company Y in 1998. In the 1980s, Product A Conferences were very successful Communities of Interest/Practice, with widespread and boundary-spanning participation. When Company X migrated from System B to Microsoft for office automation, it failed to similarly migrate Product A to a new platform. As a result, Product A lost its luster and usage plummeted. What had been a competitive advantage for Company X - knowledge sharing across engineering, manufacturing, sales, service, and support - was lost. Lotus came to market and was successful, whereas Product A had been there first but failed to be offered as a product. Communities of practice did not make a resurgence until much later - after Company Z aquired Company Y - and even then, not as much across organizational boundaries. Company X might have succeeded if it had continued to embrace knowledge sharing as it once had.