1. The Whole Enchilada:
Intellectual Capital and YOU
Author: Jack Gordon
Training Magazine (Minneapolis, Minn.) Vol. 36; Sept. 1999
It isn'tas if corporate "universities"didn'texist10 years ago, but a person would have been hard-pressed to name five
of them. There was McDonald's Hamburger U, of course, and Motorola University. Then what?
Today corporate U's are thick on the ground. Harley-Davidson, Anheuser-Busch, Dell Computer, Southwest Airlines,
FirstUnion National Bank,K-Mart and Unisys are onlya few ofthe familiar names nowflying the universityflag. A study
by Corporate UniversityXchange Inc., a New York advocacy group,found that the number ofcorporate U's quadrupled
in the past decade, from about 400 in 1988 to 1,600 in 1998.
It's one thing to count corporate U's,however, and quite another to explain how they differ from "training departments."
As a marketing tactic, certainly, the university label can be useful for promoting training courses to executives and
workers alike.But aside from the banners and T-shirts and coffee mugs freshlyemblazoned with the logo of dear old
Corporate U, what's changed? Pressed to describe in functional terms how those 1,600 universities differ,as a group,
from workaday corporate training functions,people who otherwise attach great importto the proliferation of corporate
U's get tongue-tied.
Gloria Regalbuto, however, has no trouble at all explaining the significance of the university tag. It's entirely about
marketing,declares the director of the Heartland Academy in Reynoldsburg,OH,the corporate university for the Bath
& Body Works retail chain. But she doesn't mean marketing in the sense that if you call the training department a
university and forswear the word training in favor of "education," management will let you run more courses, and
employees will be more willing to attend them. Perish the thought.
No, she means marketing in the sense that switching to the university label allows you to open a fresh conversation
with managementaboutyour role in the organization."The advantage of 'corporate university' is that you get rid of the
word training," she says. "'Training' is a self-fulfilling term. That's all you'll be allowed to do."
Except for the window itgives you to reposition the training function,she suggests,the "university"conceitis irrelevant.
You can kick-startthe same conversationbyappropriating the title of chieflearning officer.Both terms are useful atthe
moment, she says," partly because the CEO hears that the guy down the road has a CLO or a corporate university,
and he wants one, too."
No matter. The importantthing is to use the opening to broaden your role and win a seat at the table where strategic
decisions are made.Grabbing thatseatis the onlyway you'll ever be allowed to operate notjustas a supplier oftraining
courses but as a bona fide "performance consultant"--a person who is expected to concern herself with the myriad
human and business issues that people in the "training" field have talked about for decades under the banner of
performance technology.
But this is about more than performance tech, Regalbuto says. It's about positioning yourself so that you have some
real influence in managing the organization's intellectual capital.
“To do that," she says,"you need a high-level view. You have to sitat the table with the executives. There's no chance
to do that as a 'training director.' But as a chief learning officer, or the dean of the corporate university, you can."

2. The distinction between a corporate U and a training department should be, she says, that "the corporate university,
like the CLO, is responsible for the whole enchilada: training, performance support and knowledge management."
“You can't walk away from the issue of managing intellectual capital," Regalbuto insists. But there is a catch. Today,
she says,the likelihood thata person with a training background is up to the task "depends entirelyon the skills ofthe
individual."Experience in the training field per se does notnecessarilyprepare you for the role.A historyof filling seats
in classrooms doesn't qualify you for the job.
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
That's a big catch, particularly when it comes to the knowledge management slice of the enchilada --the piece most
closelyassociated with the term intellectual capital.There are a thousand definitions ofknowledge management,and
companies thathave begun to wrestle with the beastare attacking it from many different angles.Essentially,though,
KM is an effort to capture or tap an organization's collective experience and wisdom--including the "tacit" know-how
that exists in people's heads--and to make it accessible and useful to everyone in the enterprise.
The March-April issue of the Harvard Business Review carried an article that started a buzz in KM circles and that
provides a helpful framework for thinking aboutthe subject.In "What's Your Strategy for Managing Knowledge?"Morton
T. Hansen and Nitin Nohria,both of the Harvard Business School,and Thomas Tierneyof the Boston consulting firm
Bain & Co. propose thatthere are two basic strategies for knowledge management:codification and personalization.A
companymustuse both, they say, but it mustemphasize one or the other. The choice hinges noton the industry the
company is in, but on the nature of its business strategy.
The codification approach, practiced by large consulting firms such as Andersen Consulting and Ernst & Young,
concentrates on ways to codify and store knowledge in computer databases, "where it can be accessed and used
easilyby anyone in the company....Knowledge is codified using a 'people-to-documents'approach;itis extracted from
the person who developed it, made independent of that person, and reused for various purposes."
The personalization strategy, favored by consulting firms such as Bain, McKinsey & Co., and the Boston Consulting
Group, emphasizes people-to-people knowledge-sharing."[K]nowledge is closelytied to the person who developed it
and is shared mainlythrough direct person-to-person contacts.The chief purpose of computers atsuch companies is
to help people communicate knowledge,notto store it....Knowledge that has not been codified--and probablycouldn't
be--is transferred in brainstorming sessions and one-on-one conversations."
Regardless ofthe strategycompanies favor,the presententhusiasm for knowledgemanagementis rooted in computer
networks.This, obviously, is because of the new opportunities they offer not just for storing and codifying information
but for allowing people in global companies to communicate more easilyregardless ofwhere they work. Because KM
efforts depend so heavily on computer systems,theyoften are controlled,or influenced to a great degree,by computer
experts, the people in the organization's information-technology (IT) department.
But while knowledge managementoperates via computer systems,itisn'tabout computers --and itcan'tbe if it is to be
effective. It has to be aboutlearning.More than that, ithas to be aboutlearning thatis directlyuseful on the job,learning
that enables better performance.If the computer age has taught us nothing else thus far, it has hammered home the
lesson thatthe lastthing people need to help them do their jobs better is greater quantities ofraw information.If sifting
through the "codified" knowledge stored in those databases for the scrap of pertinent data I need is like looking for a
needle in a haystack, or if the additional "opportunities"I am offered for person-to-person communication via e-mail or
Lotus Notes become a gigantic waste of my time, then knowledge management does nothing but tighten the
stranglehold that infoglut already exerts on my throat.

3. "I'm worried about Joe Performer," says Jenifer Lippincott, director of business development for Consultec, a Boston
consulting firm specializing in online learning."We know people want the information they need to be successful.But
information isn't useful to them if it's too complex or if it gets in the way of doing the job."
Too often, she says, what's passing today for knowledge management is just "more silos of information cropping up
within departments. The sales department, the manufacturing people and so on are all posting their own Web sites,
saying, 'Here's all the information you'd ever need to know about our silo.' This stuff used to live in different binders;
now it lives on differentWeb pages.That doesn'thelp the individual performer,who needs to get at the information in
an integrated way."
WHAT'S THE POINT?
Knowledge management is a new endeavor for most companies, still in the fad stage, yet already it is falling into
disrepute--along with information systems in general. "Increasingly," writes Boston University management professor
Tom Davenport in CIO magazine, "it is becoming apparent that if no one is actually informed by or learns from the
information provided over the IT infrastructure, then there's not much point to the whole endeavor."
A study earlier this year by PriceWaterhouse-Coopers and the Conference Board,a New York research organization,
concluded that "more and more companies are implementing knowledge management at some level, but few are
reaping benefits from this omnipresent management strategy."
In a June column in Fortune magazine, Thomas Stewart, author of Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of
Organizations (Doubleday,1997), pointed to a study by Forrester Research of Cambridge,MA, which found that "six
out of seven companies investing in [knowledge management] are doing so on faith--not even trying to measure the
return." That won't last, he warns, citing a Forrester analyst who predicts, "'There are six to 12 more months of easy
money' before KM gets scrutinized like anything else.
"The gravy train has sprung a leak, as it should," Stewart writes. "There's no more ardent advocate of knowledge
management than I, but show me the money or kill it."
OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS
There would appear to be a golden opportunityhere for training professionals to step up to the plate. Who, after all,is
supposed to be the company's learning expert? Who is supposed to understand how adults learn and how learning
supports job performance? Whose expertise is supposed to center specificallyon creating learning opportunities that
do not just "educate" people or pass along information but that build real job skills that allow people to perform more
effectively--skills that let them do things that matter to them and to the company, not just know things that might or
might not be useful?
Training, electronic performance support and knowledge management share the same fundamental goal: to reduce
the cycle time to effective--hopefullyexpert--job performance.And the same computer systems thatfacilitate knowledge
management are blurring the distinctions between KM, EPS and training.
In some ways, the three are converging. For instance, if the main point of your "codification" approach to KM is to
deliver immediatelyuseful information to me as I do my job--justenough,justwhen I need it, and in a form so easyfor
me to access that it's almost seamless--then an EPS tool is nothing less than the ultimate example of knowledge
management.

4. As for training,the brief,online "chunks"ofjust-in-time informationIgetfrom an EPS or KM system can now be reused
and strung together as modules of a longer, formal training course.
John Ryan, group manager of field education at Sun Microsystems' Sun University in Palo Alto, CA, finds it difficult
these days to conduct a conversation abouttraining,EPS and KM as separate entities."If you create 'learning objects'
and give them to people who are already skilled,that can be all they need," he says. "But then you can integrate the
same objects into a [longer] training course. Or you can use them as job aids to give to new people."
But if the lines are blurring,it becomes all the more importantto distinguish one learning strategyfrom another and to
know when and why to use a particular approach.When you look at job performance from "a systems point of view,"
Ryan says, the challenge becomes how to integrate training with knowledge management. Everything has to revolve
around the person who is trying to do a real job."Do they need examples?"Ryan asks."Send a demo on CDROM. Do
they need discussion? That can be a Web conference or a phone conference. Do they need practice in some team
activity? Put them in a classroom. Do they need a skills assessment? Test them online. Then they can get feedback
either online or byphone or from a manager,in person....Assess their skills onlineand bringback a customized [training]
curriculum. Or, if they just need to be kept up to date, integrate knowledge management into the task."
THE LEARNING PIECE
This year's Training Directors' Forum Conference, held in Phoenix in June and sponsored by TRAINING's parent
company, was marketed with a heavy emphasis on knowledge management. The 400 attendees who participated in
an unscientific poll at the conference were, presumably, more interested in KM than a truly representative sample of
training managers would be. Still, only 42 percent said they were "very involved" in their organization's KM activities
(see chart). Of those who said thatKM has a "home"in their company, just16 percent said thathome is in the training
function. Fifty-four percentsaid training is notan appropriate home for KM. As for who owns the KM function now and
who is most likely to own it in the future, the most popular answer to both questions, by far, was "shared custody."
If "shared custody" means thatpeople from many different parts of the organization need to have a say in the design,
and particularlyin the operation,of a KM system,the respondents who chose thatoption won't get an argumentfrom
anyone TRAINING has met. Everyone agrees that the IT folks must have a high seat at the table; knowledge
management can't happen today without them. Everyone agrees that the people who do the actual jobs that KM is
supposed to support must be in charge of the "content"; they have to supply the ideas and information that wil l be
shared, and they have to be the ones to decide what kind of information is useful to them.
But somebody is going to sit at the head of the table. "Knowledge management is not on the front burner of trainers'
minds,"says Douglas Weidner,chiefknowledge engineer for PRC Inc., a McLean, VA, subsidiaryof Litton Industries
that designs ITsystems for governmentand corporate clients."And in another two years it will be too late. Someone is
going to take control."
"The person at the top of the company's learning structure has to be a learning leader,"offers Ray Svenson,a partner
in SWI Consulting of Chicago. "So it behooves the training leader to take some initiative....When knowledge
management is being driven by the IT crowd, they won't even think to include the training-and-development people."
Also, he warns, the woods are full of vendors pushing their products and services as knowledge management
"solutions." "They won't go through the T&D door," he says, "they'll go through the tech door."
Weidner speaks ofthose vendors the way cotton farmers refer to boll weevils. "They've taken over again,justas they
did with reengineering,"he complains."Vendors who couldn'tspell knowledge two years ago have tagged 'knowledge
management'onto everything they sell.'Here's a scanner for scanning documents into the computer--that's knowledge
management.''Bring on Lotus Notes so people can collaborate--that's knowledge management.''Put up an intranet--
that's knowledge management.' No, it isn't."

5. At its heart, KM isn'tabout technology, it's about culture change,Weidner says.And unless people with some insight
into human behavior get involved, it isn't going to work.
THE CULTURE PIECE
KM isn'tgoing to work either,of course,ifit falls prey to a power struggle between the training tribe and the IT tribe and
devolves into the pet project of one side or the other. "This can't be a battle," Weidner says, "though there will be
tension."
In his CIO article, Davenport suggests a marriage,which is probably the right metaphor. And the fact is that some of
those vendors will have legitimate and important roles to play in catering the wedding.
As for the idea that running a KM initiative is first and foremostaboutculture change,Sheldon Ellis would second that
motion. A microbiologist who has worked both as a product manager and as a technical trainer, Ellis is manager of
learning systems for Buckman Laboratories, a privately held specialty chemical company with headquarters in
Memphis,TN. He heads the Buckman Learning Center,essentiallythe corporate university, and is a key player in the
company's KM effort.
Buckman Labs has been attacking the KM puzzle in its global operations since itgot its first e-mail system in the mid-
1980s.What the companyhas learned,Ellis says,is that if you want people to share their knowledge with each other,
the prerequisite is a corporate culture that encourages knowledge-sharing: "Everyone here has what's called a work
profile.It says that for you to be successful in your job,you've got to share whatyou know.Part of the criteria for raises
and promotions is,'Did you get out and share?'Part of the reason I'm in this job is because I reached out and shared
what I knew."
When Ellis took the reins of the Buckman Learning Center, he says, "I got a personal note from [company co-owner]
Bob Buckman that said,'Welcome to the revolution.'" (Which raises an obvious pointabout culture change:Whoever
is in charge of the KM effort will need strong support from the company's top executives.)
What expertise does Ellis himselfcall upon to do his job? "I have to understand the technology," he says,"but only on
a basic level; I stole two people from the IT departmentwho have very good technical skills.A lot of the instructional
design we do is online, so I also need a basic understanding of that. But I have a woman [on staff] with a strong
background in instructional design,and she gets nervous ifI actually start to talk aboutdesigning a course.She leads
us through the learning piece.
“My job is to make it all happen," he says. "I have to blend the technology and the learning theory. When we started,
[knowledge management] was about the technology, but it moves more and more into the learning part. If we buy a
new tool, it either works or it doesn't; it's just an enabler. It's the learning that's important."
ADDED MATERIAL
JACK GORDON is editor of TRAINING. jgordon@trainingmag.com
Source: Training, September 1999, Vol. 36 Issue 9, p30 Item: 511127221