Considering data warehousing as one way to manage huge amounts of data - is this an appropriate way to make knowledge management more intuitive and therefore more accessible for more people ?

Response from Chris Hemingway, Cranfield and Mike Davis, Butler Group. Data warehousing is an effective way of collecting information into a form that can be analysed. However, one requires appropriate tools to extract valuable information which can be used as knowledge.

Within our company, we encourage the ownership of ideas and projects by each of the members in very practical ways.

How can we retain the sense of pride and personal success that drives so much of our work, whilst moving towards a global knowledge and project management infrastructure?

Response from Karin Breu, Cranfield School of Management.

The large majority of projects in today's businesses are complex, engaging a number of people. The success of projects depending on the contribution of teams is sensibly recognised by rewarding the team effort.

However, I fully understand your concern for recognising the individual achievement. The only way to satisfy both the desire for rewarding teams and individuals would be to design dual reward models.

How does the role of creative management stimulate knoweldge management?

There is little doubt that creativity encourages innovation, and thus how does this affect knowledge management. Surely companies that cannot 'capture' the creativity of their employees in knowledge management systems will lose out to those that can?

Response from Chris Hemingway and Karin Breu, Cranfield School of Management

Effective knowledge management requires the use of innovative working models to encourage people to collaborate in creating and sharing knowledge. This is particularly important for utilising tacit knowledge, which is the key resource to feed the innovation process. Whether collaborating virtually or face to face, managers need to facilitate and encourage interaction between different people and in different ways. Working models such as communities of practice and virtual teams are such environments that get tacit knowledge to flow. It is less a matter of "capturing" creativity, than getting it to flow.

How will mobility combine with self-service learning to provide an effective alternative to class room based training in people skills?

Response from Chris Hemingway and Karin Breu, Cranfield School of Management.

E-learning not only provides employees with the flexibility when and how they learn, but enables the organisation to train the work force faster, to reduce training costs and to better monitor employees training progress.

These benefits are naturally enhanced if e-learning is provided mobile when people are on the move, i.e. they can use otherwise unproductive time to engage in learning.

We run a global remote access service in order to operate as a virtual team accross geographical boundaries ie: US, Africa and Europe.

Occasionally, there are problems operationally in keeping this service going.

What are the latest technologies available to make running such a service easier and promote effective working across the world.

There are many ways in which to provide global access to facilitate better team working.

Many large corporations still manage a more traditional remote access service, however, to increase access reach and reliability many are transitioning to providing tunnel access via preferred service providers.

This gives broader access points utilising high speed home connections like cable modems, internet cafe access, mobile access via PDA, phone devices while on the move.

Broadly speaking the service depends on devices, network (service provider) and content be it e-mail, video conferencing, instant messaging and you need to cover all these bases.

The technology industry is going through a recession at the moment.

What, as a manager, do you need to do to raise morale, in what is potentially a very testing time for employers and employees alike?

How can technology play a part in both raising morale and contributing towards pulling out of a recession?

Leadership is probably the most important factor through this period. Employees need to be clear that their organisation has a vision that matters. They also need to hear little and often about the companies performance, changes and successes. If you are changing direction, celebrate the small early wins to encourage momentum. At Microsoft we use our intranet with webcasting from the leadership team to show us the face and the emotion of the communication. Combine the leadership communication with quality local implementation of changes and listen to your people. This combination will ensure trust and confidence which beat a pub lunch every time, but don't forget that either.

Companies are increasingly equiping their mobile workforces with laptops and mobile phones in order to work 'out in the field'.

As the advent of even newer and more portable technologies emerge, such as PDA's and WAP phones, these will have to be integrated in to this work force culture.

How would you suggest that companies encourage the use of such devices on a corporate/professional level as opposed to the personal use that is happening at the moment?

It's not going to change the world if you just hand out mobile phones and pocket pc's, although there are a certain amount of free market forces which will show us how people want to work with these devices. The key is good quality voice/data applications that people feel assist them not hinder. Web Services developed by Microsoft and our partners may go some way to providing people with alerts about critical events, seamless sign on to corporate applications and access to aggregated calendars for instance. These will move beyond the limitations of WAP and unleash a new wave of corporate productivity.

In my view Knowledge Management for a global organisation is nothing without a thoroughly sound global IT infrastructure and strategy.

Can you give examples of organisations that have made the biggest changes in this area, and what the key criteria for achieving this might be?

I agree with your point. There is a need for highly available technology which can provide a multimedia experience with a high QoS (quality of service) Astra Zeneca has developed a common local design structure for its intranet so that links can be made between sites covering similar interests. This preserves individual freedom to work as they want but ensures input is useful to others. They have found there is an increasing need for a global framework, providing one data entry point and one single source of data. They aim to produce an information map showing where everything is using common definitions and common reference points. In my opinion, as a common data definition XML will help enormously and exposure to KM through familiar personal portals

such as Office XP using Smart tags will increase the usage of KM respositories.

Many organisations are trying to stimulate innovation. There comes a point when a basic idea needs to be moved forward and requires some commitment. This commitment normally comes from the originator of the ideas, therefore managers may lose their staff to innovation.

How do you encourage managers to encourage their staff to innovate, when they are in danger of losing them. How do you shelter innovators from management to allow them to provide some commitment to project/ideas that are not part of their primary role?

Response from Karin Breu and Chris Hemingway, Cranfield School of Management.

Innovation - be it in product, services, business processes or working practices - is key to economic success in most organisations. Organisations that do not recognise the crucial importance of taking advantage of innovative capability and employee expertise are, in most industries, bound to fail in the long term. If this view is not shared at decision making level, there is, unfortunately, little employees can do about it.

Informal networking and participating in interest groups is one potential way to find people elsewhere in the organisation to share their interests and to increase their influence.

Knowledge Management? Yet another consulting fad?

What pragmatic approach in terms of knowledge management and collabotative working could the smaller company undertake, taking into consideration time and money constraints of a small or/and medium size venture?

Steve Z. Skowyrski

ING Lease (UK) Ltd

Response from Karin Breu, Cranfield School of Management.

Organisations' key competitive asset is their employees' expert knowledge base, frequently referred to in terms of "tacit knowledge". Research has established that the best strategies for exploiting tacit knowledge are to provide people - be it face to face or virtually - with environments where they can engage in the exchange of specialised, expert knowledge. The best known example of such environments are so called communities of practice/interest. Fairly inexpensive technology environments for allowing people to collaborate and exchange expertise are web-based collaborations applications (e.g. Microsoft NetMeeting). Using technology for knowledge management is not necessarily a matter of major investment but equally a question of the creative use of people and working environments.

It has been said that a management consultant will sell you a watch then ask you the time?, basically that thay are really information gatherers & disseminators, rather than necessarily adding real value to a business.

How does the panel see the role of such people changing through the increased dependence upon IT and systems, will they become obsolete in their current form & be replaced by IT consultants instead?

Should IT organisations adopt a common language to enable transfer of data between systems rather than leave their customers with legacy problems when they move on? Or is this an opportunity for the further work-cynical maybe? Remember Y2K!

Dave Jamieson

I believe that the role of consultants has, by necessity, changed in recent years - consultants who work in the technology area need to have skills in both technology and change management, and need to understand the business implications of each solution. It is no longer sufficient to deliver a theoritcal strategy document - in an e-business world, solutions need to be practical if they are to add value.

For this reason, increasingly, consultancy firms are undertaking projects on a shared risk/reward partnership basis. If the client gets no benefit, part of the consultancy fee may be put at risk. Vice-versa with benefits.

As for a common language, of course this will be helpful in simplifying data transfer. New technologies such as XML provide a standard which supports this. I believe it will be some time before a true common language is established and until then there will be legacy problems.

Does the panel feel that with the impending introduction of 3rd Generation Mobile Phones, BlueTooth technology and high speed mobile internet access, WAP was a forseeable waste of corportate spending, or do they see it as another case of 'Betamax before VHS'?

There is no direct relationship between 3G and WAP, as WAP is a protocol designed for low speed mobile data interchange. Therefore, we can foresee WAP solutions being implemented in the short to medium term over GSM and GPRS. With the advent of 3G, there will be scope for the WAP standard itself to become more sophisticated and live up to the initial marketing hype.

Mobile phones have seen huge growth over the period of the last 3/4 years. How long will it be before we are all talking to each other through mobile video-conferencing phones, and what implications does this have for the enterprise of tomorrow?

Response from Chris Hemingway, Cranfield University.

3G Mobile will provide sufficient band width for video conferencing and should be introduced in the UK from 2003 onwards. I expect it will be sometime after that before mobile video conferencing technology matures and becomes widely available.

It may be the case that mobile video is only used for specific purposes, just as desk top video conferencing is used now. Given that mobile devices are often used in public, the use of video has both positive and negative implications (e.g. the video would give information about where the caller really is).

Response from Neil Eke, Compaq.

We will see streaming video and video conferencing services introduced when GPRS becomes widely available towards the end of 2001.

Do you see the future of Peer-to-Peer networking technology as being beneficial to the day to day running of an international corporation, and do you feel the negative publicity brought on by illegal file swapping is hindering this technologies progress.

The value of peer to peer networking for content delivery has been proven by internet services such as Napster. There will be a growing demand for the electronic delivery of content and, unless alternatives prove vastly superior, there is no reason why peer to peer should not continue to be used.

Clearly, the legal issues relating to intellectual property must be addressed in order to protect the providers of electronic content. This is an issue facing e-business generally and is by no means specific to peer to peer networking. The challenge of developing effective legislation and regulation has to be met by governments and industries at an international level.

In light of recent "global recession" worries, tech stocks losing face and digital advancements in the area of mobile communications, do these three factors symbolise a natural progression to reduce future companies workforce to its lowest common denominator?

Whether or not there is a global recession, our experience is that the highest performing companies consistently focus on creating an efficient work force. Organisations which have gone through this process will be best able to respond to economic turndown. The Cranfield research shows that the use of b2e tools can create these efficiences and enable organisations to weather the storm.

Does the salary - equity trade off still work in light of the recent poor performance of technology stocks? It seems that for the workforce, it can be more demotivating seeing their options become worthless and that new employees currently prefer high salaries again, seeing any equity dividend purely as a bonus?

Do you work for Microsoft? :-)

Our experience as a company is that we have amongst the lowest attrition rates in our industry, even though our stock has fallen from its previous high. Our organisational Health index shows people value the environment, the work and the people they work with higher than the pay. I think that you must pay a benefits package in the upper percentile range compared with your competitors but fundamentally provide a great work environment/culture. If your people believe in what you are doing they will ride the down turn and benefit from stock performance as and when it comes.

How do Companies recognise talent and what strategies are in place to combat the retention issues facing the IT industry?

How much thought is given within a Company in the investment of technology to retain talent?

Response from Karin Breu, Cranfield School of Management.

For any organisation to retain staff, it is crucial to be recognised as an attractive employer. In the context of our b2e research, we found that employees today increasingly expect working environments that allow them to use latest information technology, to continuously update their IT literacy, to be empowered to work independent of work location and to benefit from the liberating opportunities of mobile and home working.

Our b2e survey shows that high performing organisations do invest in technology in a way that they can bring out the best in their employees' talent.

1: Define business agility?

2: What place does knowledge management have in the healthcare setting?

3: Should knowledge management be part of a nationwide approach to healthcare management as a whole, or do you believe individual hospitals/units must first implement their own taskforce?

1: Response from Chris Hemingway, Cranfield University. We have defined workforce agility in terms of speed of action, flexibility to change and the capability to realise b2e benefits. Clearly, this is only the one component of business agility overall.

2: Response from Mike Davis, Butler Group. It is everything. Without it there can be no progression or development of healthcare treatment. Healthcare organisations have relied for too long on tacit knowledge i.e. sharing whats in each others heads rather than having strategies and systems to capture, retain and disseminate.

3: Response from Mike Davis, Butler Group. Yes, there should be a nationwide approach. However, there are several hundred organisations in UK healthcare, all at different stages of IT infrastructure and strategy, therefore, there can be quick local gains for those organisations that implement early and individually. The key will be to have standards which will allow for the aggregation as other organisations follow suit.