Redefi ning Knowledge Management Systems and Processes in a Web 2.0 World

Transcription

1 White Paper Redefi ning Knowledge Management Systems and Processes in a Web 2.0 World Moving beyond the hype and making it real GBS Learning and Knowledge

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3 Page 3 3 Abstract 4 Introduction Table of Contents 5 From Knowledge Management to Knowledge Sharing 6 Web 2.0 Technology Applied to KS ## Practitioner 2.0 ## Conclusion Abstract For decades, Knowledge Management systems and processes have been defined and governed around access to tightly guarded assets. With the advent of Web 2.0 this governance is seriously challenged. Consumer technology has outpaced what is commonly available to workers in the corporate world. Consumers, not centeralized departments, are now driving the world of social networking and collaboration. In order to adapt to changing times employers must redefine how they approach Knowledge Management. In today s emerging world of digital convergence, we must overturn traditional delivery approaches, and move from the inflexible Knowledge Management systems of old into a culture of Knowledge Sharing. Throughout this transformation we have moved beyond the hype and transformed IBMs processes and systems by applying the success of consuemer Web 2.0 technologies within the walls of the corporation, leveraging the collective intelligence of the employees, enabling cross-border and cross-generational collaboration, and not only preserving but enhancing the rich base of intellectual capital within IBM.

4 Page 4 Introduction The IBM PC was introduced 26 years ago. Employees enjoyed state of the art client server computing, while home computing was limited to TRS-80s and 300 baud acoustic coupler modems for dial up connection. Technology at the workplace was clearly superior to what was commonly available at home, although access to computing was limited to a portion of the workforce. Fast forward to Consumer technology has suddenly outpaced what is commonly available to most workers in the corporate world. Employees use Google to search for materials on their own websites. Wikipedia is one of the most common reference sites for information and knowledge. The use of social tags to find videos on YouTube or photos on Flickr is widespread. Prior to making purchases on line or in store, customers routinely go to websites to check product ratings and comments made by fellow shoppers. Social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are creating communities and connecting people in a way never before experienced in human history. Web 2.0 is not a short lived fad or phenomenon; it is a paradigm-changing force. When people search at work, they expect it to be as fast and accurate as Google. The 2008 Global CEO Study by IBM found that most CEOs are bombarded by change, that the rate of change is increasing, and that many are struggling to keep up. Enterprises that will be most successful in the future are the ones that can not only respond to the rapid pace of change, but also leverage that change. The CEO Study found that financial out-performers are making bolder plays. These companies anticipate more change, and manage it better. They are also more global in their business designs, partner more extensively with their customers and choose more disruptive forms of business model innovation. The IBM Global Business Services (GBS) Learning and Knowledge team has taken the bold initiative to radically redefine existing knowledge management systems and processes with the ultimate goal of providing an environment that will: take advantage of the power of Web 2.0 without throwing away the rich collection of assets which have been built up over many years leverage the collective intelligence of the workforce, connecting employees across geographies, organizational hierarchies, and lines of business allow multiple generations of workers, the digital natives and the digital immigrants, to thrive in this brave new world

5 Page 5 This paper describes the systems and activities of this transformation project which apply the consumer technologies of Web 2.0 successfully within a corporate context. From Knowledge Management to Knowledge Sharing Many companies treat knowledge like data and information, and manage it tightly, like a commodity. A corporate taxonomy defines exactly how to categorize and file assets, and entire departments of Knowledge Managers are charged with the responsibility of defining and managing the governance and processes around access to these tightly guarded assets. Web 2.0 turns these ideas on their head; the very things that made the old paradigm successful control, structure, centralization are the very things that will doom a Web 2.0-based Knowledge strategy. Conversely, many of the drawbacks of the traditional knowledge management model (labor-intensive, costly, often highly manual) are diminished or not present at all as the activity of knowledge creation, categorization, and sharing becomes distributed to each and every employee. In Web 2.0, knowledge is shared, not managed. Individuals look not only to the organization as a source of information, but also more and more to each other. They look to each other as sources for content, as well as for validation and vetting of content. Is this any good? Where is the best example? Who can I talk to that can help me? The corporation is still a valuable source of information and context, but it is no longer the only one.

6 Page 6 Formal taxonomies are replaced by a loosely defined folksonomy 1 of social tags that is dynamic, flexible, organic, and reflects the collective intelligence of the users. Many corporate staff organizations cannot conceive how social software works. Without a formal hierarchy in place, they believe, the inevitable outcome must be anarchy and chaos. Yet, open source projects like Linux and Wikipedia have shown that it is possible and successful. The key cultural barrier that must be overcome is to let go. Trust the users. The user-defined folksonomy can be as successful, if not more successful, than the formal taxonomy. It is possible, for example, to find a photograph of a monarch butterfly on Flickr without having to navigate animal world > insects > flying insects > butterfly species > monarch. The first step in the evolution from Knowledge Management to Knowledge Sharing is letting go at the key points of control. In most cases, this means the centralized knowledge management organization and the top executive levels. Without this leap of faith, and letting go, the shift cannot happen. But, letting go is just part of the equation. Once the knowledge management team lets go, it s up to the employees in the organization to pick up the activity. Web 2.0 is all about active participation. Employees must share. They must be active users - contributing and engaging, instead of passively searching and browsing. They must contribute at all levels, from high powered assets to rating, tagging, editing content and providing feedback. When these two complementary behaviors take place, traditional knowledge management goes from a centrally controlled activity, to one which is in the hands of the users becoming a knowldge sharing organizagtion. Web 2.0 Technology applied to Knowledge Sharing Key Success Factors 1. Flexible Platform 2. Quick build and deployment cycles 3. Blend of old and new technologies 1 Vanderwal, T. (2005). Off the Top: Folksonomy Entries. Visited November 5, See also: Smith, Gene. Atomiq: Folksonomy: social classification. Aug 3, Retrieved January 1, 2007.

7 Page 7 The Right Platform Large-scale technology implementations are always challenging. Given the combination of rate of change in technical capabilities, increasing software service sources and increasing user expectations, successfully implementing and supporting knowledge sharing platforms is especially difficult. In this environment, a key success factor is the platform selection. It is imperative that the platform be flexible, allow for easy and fast maintenance, be readily extensible, and allow for rapid functional enhancements. In addition to the platform itself, the approach to enhancements and maintenance must allow for quick build and deployment cycles. Any knowledge sharing system must be able to rapidly reflect emerging business priorities, so an ability to quickly build and deploy changes or make enhancements is critical. Another key success factor is to adopt an approach to blend old, proven technologies with new, high-potential, yet relatively untested technologies. A mix that leverages a solid functional base and incorporates bleeding edge functionality in a controlled way has proven to offer a good balance. Applying all three of these elements use of an extensible platform, endorsing and enabling quick build and deployment cycles, and blending solid base functionality with bleeding edge functionality significantly improves the likelihood of achieving the desired results. These principles were applied and are reflected in the substantial changes to the knowledge sharing platform in 2007/2008 that underpins the successful shift from traditional knowledge management to knowledge sharing. The previous platform was a large, complex custom application that evolved over many years with multiple layers of interconnected functionality. While the platform was considered successful for its purpose, it was so complex that enhancements and maintenance were both expensive and time consuming. In 2007, the L&K organization began a project to overhaul the platform and completely re-design the application base. The selection of Websphere Portal 6 provided a completely new Services Oriented Architecture dynamic, improving the development cycles, costs and end user capabilities.

8 Page 8 Some key attributes of the new approach include: A portal base providing basic functionality Open standards that allow for Agile development from all over the world (see A extensible portlet approach that allows multiple organizations to develop their own portlets that can be added to a portlet palette and/or a portal tab End-user customization and profiling, including an ability to personally select and add portlets to any portal tab Reduced cycle time between functionality releases due to the Web 2.0 portletbased functionality approach Learning and Knowledge s new Services Oriented Architecture approach has improved end-user capabilities, reduced costs, accelerated development and deployment times to truly provide a Web 2.0 environment for knowledge sharing. Technology now facilitates traditional content management activities Previous knowledge management processes required many labor-based processes. While largely effective for its core service, this was costly and limited in scalability. New technologies are now allowing for automation of traditionally manual content lifecycle processes and are accelerating the time to publish assets. Some examples of this automation are highlighted below. Auto-tagging After the contribution process, auto-tagging allows for the automatic classification to a core taxonomy, providing two key benefits: 1) users no longer have to take the time to select taxonomy keywords at the point of submission; and 2) content review teams no longer have to review, correct or populate field values. The end result is a much faster contribution process, eliminated review steps and improved accuracy (which improves the end-user ability to find assets in a search). Auto-archiving Previous archiving approaches called for periodic quality assessments by subject matter experts. The labor intensive, asset-by-asset review would result in a determination of whether each asset should be retained or archived. While functional, this approach was expensive, time consuming, and limited in its coverage due to capacity and financial constraints for subject matter experts.

9 Page 9 The new approach leverages information available in the system based on user interaction, then applies that information to automatically archive content based on pre-defined criteria. Every document amasses what is called its activity score. This score is a weighted blend of activity on a document such as user visits or hits, number of downloads, number of social tags, user rating, etc. A higher weight is applied to the activities that require users to take an active step, such as the application of a social tag. The system analyzes the activity scores each month and any document not meeting a minimum score during a rolling twelve month period is automatically archived. By leveraging all user activity instead of requiring a focused project to assess quality, we ve developed a much less expensive, much more scaleable approach that can be applied to the entire knowledge base every month. Allowing the system to maintain its own content equilibrium based on criteria that can adjust monthly as needed. Reduced content approval cycles Fundamental asset review and approval cycles have traditionally been performed by content management teams, who would review each document one-by-one, validate and update field classifications, test attachments and review abstracts. These reviews frequently required back-and-forth communication with authors and took time to reconcile. It was often several days from the time of submission to publishing. The new approach essentially eliminates the delays by publishing immediately (with the exception of required legal actions). Incorporating autotagging and auto-archiving approaches allow a much more open approach regarding content flowing into the repository. Additionally, social tagging and user ratings help surface key content so users can quickly navigate to relevant, high quality content. This approach removes 90% of the review requirements while still retaining necessary quality. Federated Search using the taxonomy For years, knowledge management programs across the company sought to tightly control asset repositories and managed repository-distinct searches (typically aligned by the different lines of business). Today s environment, calls for a new approach as the importance of complex, cross-line of business solutions grow and the need for multiple types of content increases. Federated search has provided the solution to this challenge by allowing users to have a single search window

10 Page 10 with the search hitting multiple sources. For example, Learning and Knowledge s new search hits the primary asset repository from each line of business, several hundred wikis, the corporate media library, the high value solution asset repository, and many more. This means that users can truly go to one interface and get everything at their fingertips, no longer having to search through multiple self-contained databases. A past issue with federated search was inconsistent taxonomies across repositories. This prevented coherent search results. The new technology in auto-tagging, however, provides a way around this issue without having to manage a single, enterprise taxonomy. Instead, each repository can manage its own taxonomy and knowledge base, and the auto-tagging can be directed to a combined index and to be used to create similar terms and a single set of facets for search result narrowing. This approach has dramatically improved the user experience and has not required massive unification of taxonomies or repositories around the enterprise. Social tag search using a folksonomy Social bookmarking and social tags has been available in IBM for several years. Adoption started somewhat slowly, but has grown rapidly over the last year and a half (accruing more than a million tags in this period). Today, the internal social tagging service is gaining a presence in nearly all major applications and is taking a key role in knowledge sharing. Recognizing this dynamic, Learning and Knowledge added a social tag search on the front page of the new portal. While the federated search looks across all content, the social tag search allows users to search social tags that individuals have applied to the content. This is fundamentally different, and allows for content findability in new ways. Another element of the social tag search is the ability to see the social tags applied by individuals. This allows users to know what someone else knows with immediate visibility into content others have tagged. The social tag search as a stand-alone portlet has provided valuable incremental search capabilities to the more traditional approach in the federated search.

11 IBM Business Global Transformation Business Services Outsourcing Page 11 Integrating Web 2.0 with traditional search The federated search and the social tag search have both offered substantial improvements to previous capabilities provided by single repository searches. Even more powerful is the integration of the two. The Learning and Knowledge team worked through early 2007 on this integration to offer users a Web 2.0 search that combines a federated traditional search with social tagging. This search works by allowing user to enter a single search string, which is bounced against the federated search index. A set of relevant results is returned to the system, which is then bounced against the social tag repository. The social tag repository returns tags that have been applied to the documents that were identified as relevant to the search criteria. The resulting search results contain the traditionally relevant documents across multiple repositories, plus the relevant social tags. Since the tags are all associated with the search results, they can be used as filters to narrow search results much like more traditional facets. Now, users have an ability to narrow search results by both managed taxonomy facets (enabling federation through auto-tagging) and relevant social tags. This innovative approach changes the user experience in search and accelerates time to relevant assets. Search enhancements While the new integrated Web 2.0 search offers game-changing improvements, there is always room to grow. Several enhancements have been added to the plans and include: Sponsored links similar in concept to Google, though applied differently for an internal application. Business leaders and subject matter experts can identify key assets for a given business area and these are highlighted in a portlet. The portlet is treated as a separate content source for our federated search and can promote any content that has been highlighted in a sponsored link portlet that is relevant to the search criteria in special sections of the search results. Did you mean? functionality that provides suggested synonyms or spelling corrections for user-entered terms. Recommendation engine similar to the concept demonstrated externally by sites like Amazon. The knowledge sharing parallel can make recommendations to users based on several criteria. For example, it can surface recom-

12 Page 12 mendations based on assets viewed by others who have run similar searches. It can also recommend based upon assets viewed by other users who are close in the social network proximity to the person running the search. This leverages the notion that people close in social networks have a tendency to want/ need similar content. Another element being incorporated into recommendations is a weighting based on user expertise. So, if a particular user has been designated as a formal expert, then their tags and ratings would carry more weight than the average user. These enhancements continue to drive search result quality, further accelerating business performance. RSS Really Simple Syndication (RSS) has been used in the enterprise for a few years in a relatively limited capacity as a means to allow users to subscribe to content most commonly used on sites or portlets that provide news or some other recurring publication. This allows a user to receive a push of the subscribed content rather than regularly returning to multiple sites for the content of interest. RSS has grown in its use over time and now allows people to subscribe to content posted by individuals in blogs, individual social bookmarks and many other applications. Knowledge sharing is leveraging RSS in the above examples, but is also adding it the new portal to allow users to define their own search criteria, and then save the search as an RSS subscription. This allows users to receive a proactive push of any new content or edits/updates to existing content that meets their personal interests. Expertise Locators An ever-increasing element of knowledge sharing is the ability to interact with others to receive guidance, understand context, and capitalize on previous experience and brainstorm ideas. Traditional means of expertise location were managed largely by personal networks and manual lists by the knowledge help desk. This approach was sometimes effective, but it was not scaleable or formal. New technologies have now allowed for a more robust expertise location capability that combines elements of formal and informal expertise.

13 Page 13 Informal expertise Informal expertise location is enabled by an application developed jointly by IBM Research, Lotus and Learning and Knowledge called Atlas. Atlas (referred to as SmallBlue internally) analyzes registered users outgoing s, instant message chats and corporate directory (BluePages) expertise profiles to infer expertise. The application allows searches on expertise topics and will identify the top 100 experts based on the sources described. A user can then see their own social networking path to each of the experts. Additionally, they may see the social networking diagram of all experts on a particular topic. This capability allows visibility into expertise across the organization in all geographies, making huge strides in achieving a globally integrated enterprise. Formal expertise Augmenting the informal, inferred expertise location is an approach that is more formal and managed. In an application called Blue Reach, people can register as an expert and spend time providing guidance/assisting others. Experts can designate office hours that will show them on-line to the instant message box in the Blue Reach application during the specified hours. If they are logged into the normal instant message service outside of their designated office hours, then they will not show as on-line in Blue Reach. The Blue Reach application, in addition to showing available experts, also facilitates the connection by providing a special instant message window. Upon the conclusion of any interaction the application also requests ratings and feedback from each user. This allows each expert to see summaries of their time spent and the resulting value as perceived by the other parties. Both SmallBlue and Blue Reach are made available in the new portal. The combination of informal and formal expertise location has dramatically enhanced user capabilities and further accelerates time to business performance. Instant Messaging One of the best examples of grass-roots Web 2.0 employee behavior is IBM s instant messaging application, SameTime. Originally started as an experiment, the value to instant messaging was so great that it became one of the most rapid (non-mandated) technology adoptions in IBM history.

14 Page 14 Instant messaging (IM) has provided a major change to the way people interact on a daily basis. Phone and used to dominate, but instant messaging has taken over as a pervasive, ubiquitous means of every-day communication. Functionality such as the ability to send a screen-grab via IM, to send a file via IM (reducing traffic), to send a hyperlink and even emoticons to express feelings have embedded instant messaging firmly into the way we do things around here. Instant messaging has become a way to stay in touch with a mobile, geographically diverse workforce, and has accelerated both the actual and expected response time for information requests of all kinds. Given its massive user base, it has become an important enabler to leverage in knowledge sharing. Instant messaging is being leveraged as a: Connection platform for formal expertise location Mobile device application Platform for surfacing a streamlined version of the Web 2.0 integrated search service through a plug-in Platform for surfacing formal and informal expertise location services through a plug-in These uses enhance the capabilities of a proven technology that is already being used all over the enterprise. Practitioner 2.0 The transition from Knowledge Management to Knowledge Sharing is as much a culture change as a technology change, especially in the corporate world. In the consumer world, people are free to follow new ideas, new products, and new services and only the strong survive. But in the corporate world, there are politics and baggage. The desire to take risks and lead is often tempered by the fear of failure or corporate ridicule. So, how is this new kind of practitioner created Practitioner 2.0 that can and will take advantage of what Web 2.0 has to offer? How do companies get leaders to let go, and ensure that employees will pick up the ball?

15 Page 15 Leaders Much like the central Knowledge Management organization, leaders are fearful of anarchy and chaos in the absence of specific top-down direction and control. They are worried that bad content will be added to repositories, that the wrong assets will be leveraged, and that they will lose the ability to set direction. What needs to be remembered is that there is a very wide spectrum between total control and total anarchy. One of the recommendations implemented with IBM leaders is Co-operate, don t control. What this means is that there are some things that are totally open, and other things that the leaders have the ability to control. It s not all managed, and it s not all anarchy you must have a mix of the two - a mix of both sanctioned and unsanctioned content. This middle ground provides a safety net, and enables the leaders to take that leap of faith, knowing there are some core things they can still control. Examples include the ability to: Identify key sponsored links to be surfaces during search Control editor access on sponsored links Customize structure of wiki pages Control editor access on a minimum of core wiki pages Highlight core content needs on wiki to drive contribution Create a core set of tags to influence practitioner tagging and folksonomy Some leaders have embraced the Web 2.0 approach completely, with many now authoring their own blogs and actively participating in the social networking and expertise locators within the corporation. A successful transformation will ensure that the full spectrum of leaders both early adopters and laggards is included in change management plans. Practitioners The old phrase If we build it, they will come does not necessarily apply. How do companies get the general population to participate once the central Knowledge Management team has let go and the leaders have taken the leap of faith?

16 Page 16 Education and Communications It s not enough to simply build and launch new technology and processes. No matter how simple, how intuitive, how self-explanatory the tooling, it is still necessary to let people know what s available, and help them bridge from what they use and how they behave today to what they need to use and how they need to behave going forward. As with any major change initiative, delivering the messages once is simply not sufficient messages must be delivered multiple times, through multiple, credible channels, and the messages must be sufficiently tailored as to be meaningful. Finally, to drive rapid change, traditional communication approaches must be supplemented by innovative, viral ways of driving and sustaining behavior change. IBM developed a core set of communications and messaging about the knowledge management transformation, and then customized, customized, customized. Messages were embedded in existing communication vehicles, leveraging trusted sources. Face-to-face education was delivered in both large and small sessions, knowledge sharing modules were embedded in new-hire education, and hundreds of hours of web-based education were conducted. But that was not enough..to drive Web 2.0 behavior, a Web 2.0 approach needed to be taken. At each stage in the deployment, technology and tools were leveraged to educate and inform (and sometimes entertain!): Developed a Practitioner 2.0 wiki, containing information about new processes, technology updates, and links to key communications Established a Practitioner 2.0 blog written by a global team of change management managers Deployed a Mentoring Up Knowledge Ambassador program - where young, enthusiastic digital natives worked with other employees to help bring them up the Web 2.0 learning curve Enabled mobile access to key applications, pushing the sharing of knolwedge beyond the four walls of the office Deployed a How-To video series downloadable to ipods Delivered three different viral video campaigns via IBM s internal intranet video service

17 Page 17 Once the employees knew about the new approach and tools and how to use them the next challenge was getting them to adopt them as their own. The Carrot First and foremost, the new technology and new processes must be easy and intuitive: one button to tag documents, one button to rate documents, and a simple contribution process. Repeat visitors are crucial. In addition to ease of use, we need to ensure the employees are getting value from their activity. Employees must find what they need, quickly and easily. Subject matter experts must be found within expertise locator tools. In the corporate world, participation is predicated on the fact that participating will help employees do their jobs better, faster, and in new and innovative ways. People need a reason to change their behavior. The fact that the new Knowledge Sharing model will help them do their jobs better and faster is appealing, but it s not enough. The old adage that what get s measured is what get s done still holds true. In order to change behavior, you need to change the way people are measured and rewarded, and to change the criteria for promotion. As part of IBM s Web 2.0 Knowledge Sharing model, we have put in place recognition and reward systems to encourage the new desired behaviors. There are two core components: the Points Program, and the promotion criteria. The Points Program We all want to know, How am I doing? And, we want to positively reinforce the desired behaviors of contributing, rating and tagging content. The Points Program addresses both of these objectives. The Points Program operates much like a frequent flyer program: the more active you are, the more points you get. Each time an employee contributes content, rates content, or tags content, their activity is recorded, and is reflected in a Points score. The score is a balanced scorecard, incorporating three key components: 1) How much stuff am I contributing?

18 Page 18 2) how active am I in rating and tagging other people s content?; and 3) How valuable do other people find MY content? That is, how often is my content rated, tagged, hit, and downloaded? As such, the Points score is reflective of the totality of the employee s activity, and the value derived from it, rather than merely measuring throughput. Employees can view their Points score at any time through the new Knowledge Sharing portal, as well as the key metrics that input into the overall score The Points score is used to motivate behavior change in several ways. Similar to frequent flyer programs, at certain tier levels employees are eligible for awards and prizes. Additionally, monthly reports are available to managers to review their employees activities, and to visibly recognize top contributors. Finally, the

19 Page 19 Points score can be reported to the employee s manager and may be used as a consideration in the year-end performance evaluations. Promotion Criteria In any organization, measures and criteria are in place for promotion from one level to the next, and IBM is no different. To complement the How am I doing? measures of the Points program, and ensure the Web 2.0 behaviors become part of the IBM culture, we have embedded the desired behaviors into criteria for promotion. In order to be promoted, an employee must demonstrate specific capabilities in increasingly complex or broad situations, including desired Knowledge Sharing behaviors and capabilities. Knowledge sharing activity is not by itself sufficient for promotion; however, it may be one of the objective measurements used in the evaluation process. In this way, we are driving sustained behavior change. The Stick In addition to the positive reinforcements and enticements above, there must be measures in place to ensure compliance when and where necessary. Top leadership in IBM committed to making this change successful. As such, they requested, and regularly published, a scorecard of adoption activity, putting one area of the business in direct competition with another. The Points Program mentioned above was included in this senior level scorecard, and was also leveraged by managers to drive their own scorecards. One manager rank ordered all of her employees and published the list each month. These tactics proved quite successful when regularly implemented month after month. As one executive said, It s management by embarrassment there s no way I want to show up on the bottom of that list. Another way to embed new behavior in the culture is to make it mandatory. So, for example, no one likes to complete expense reports, or file taxes, but it s mandatory to get reimbursed or your tax refund if you re lucky. By the same token, at the end of a project, no one wants to empty the project teamroom into the formal knowledge repository. So, we made it mandatory. At IBM, there is an internal group that manages the administration of all of our contracts. As part of the project lifecycle, there are certain activities that must be completed, including development of a formal statement of work, monthly billings,

20 Page 20 and contract close-out. Theses are specific process gates, and compliance with them is taken seriously and is reported on regularly. In order to drive behavior changes into the very fabric of what gets done every day, we partnered with the contract administration group and piggy-backed on their process gates. So, now, each process gate includes the requirement to contribute certain kinds of knowledge capital, and that gate cannot be passed until the content has been added to the knowledge repository. While these two approaches (management by embarrassment and mandating contributions) may initially seem contrary to Web 2.0 philosophy, they are actually the first steps in a long-term behavior change. When seat belt laws were originally enacted, many people buckled up because they were afraid of a ticket. Now, it s become an ingrained habit for most people to wear seatbelts in the car. The same concept holds true here: what is initially mandated will become habit and the way we do things around here. Conclusion Through adoption of web 2.0 technologies and tools the Learning and Knowledge group has redefined IBM s Knowledge Management systems and processes moving beyond the hype and positioning the consulting practice, and IBM as a whole, for ongoing success and industry leadership. The Learning & Knowledge team did not merely respond to trends, they took advantage of technology and sociological shifts to help shape and lead the approach to knowledge and enterprise Web 2.0 adoption. They drove a bold, disruptive change that overturned the traditional delivery approaches, and reinvented the meaning of Knowledge Sharing. In designing and developing solutions, the Learning & Knowledge team collaborated with groups across IBM, listening and responding to their needs and choosing a development platform that enables ongoing collaboration as needs develop and mature. Expertise and talent were leveraged across the globe, accessing people and knowledge wherever they reside. Global perspectives and input are reflected in the final design, as are considerations for the impact of the design on the environment.

21 Page 21 The transformed processes and systems apply the success of consumer Web 2.0 technologies within the walls of the corporation, leveraging the collective intelligence of the employees, enabling cross-border and cross-generational collaboration, and not only preserving but enhancing the rich base of intellectual capital within IBM.

22 Copyright IBM Corporation 2008 IBM Global Business Services Route 100 Somers, NY U.S.A. Produced in the United States of America All Rights Reserved IBM and the IBM logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. References in this publication to IBM products or services do not imply that IBM intends to make them available in all countries in which IBM operates. BCW00016-USEN-00