How to encourage and educate users to share knowledge, build trust among each other, and collect that knowledge.

Action taken:

Buckman Labs understands well how difficult it could be to persuade employees to contribute their knowledge to solve business problems. Nonetheless, Buckman got around this issue. First, Buckman began an on-line break rooms series of private forums on CompuServe. These forums helped "employees get to know each other and build trust" among these users. Now, senior management feels that employees have been evangelized and are in the process of transferring those on-line forums to its K’Netix KM Intranet system (K’Netix).

Results:

Buckman has been successful transferring these forums to K’Netix. Meanwhile, employees are sharing knowledge with each other and solving problems more efficiently around the globe. In addition, users of K’Netix find useful Netscape Communicator’s search abilities sufficient to search for forum threads and get answers to their immediate knowledge needs.

Even though Buckman is being successful in getting users to contribute their knowledge, it is also finding that investments in KM projects could be expensive. Buckman spends about 2.5% of its revenues on all its KM initiatives [R4]. However, it has been trying to keep its cost at "about $7,500 per user annually" [R12].