Business Exposed152
would not hold up in court, because all of them had already
been preliminarily invalidated by the US Patent and Trademark
Ofce, while two of them had already received a nal rejection,
but when it seemed that a particular US district court judge
(the Honorable Judge James Spencer) was inclined to grant the
injunction, which would have cost RIM billions in lost revenue
and lost competitive advantage, they promptly – but undoubtedly
grudgingly – decided to hand over $612.5 million to NTP.
Getting scared already? I guess you should. There just might be
some shark circling underneath, in your blue ocean . . . holding
some obscure patent which could cost you an arm and a leg, if
not more.
Information overload – and how to deal with it (if
you’re the one loading)
Knowledge in the management of corporations remains a tricky
thing, and that is because it is such a fundamental topic –
and raison d’être – for organizations. We’re just a bunch of
people working together and therefore we need to exchange and
retain knowledge. Thus, most decisions in organizations require
information. And usually we have to actively look for that infor-
mation. We approach colleagues who have dealt with similar
issues, are knowledgeable about the context, the customer or the
technology, and try to incorporate their experiences and insights.
Nowadays, in our “knowledge economy”, many companies have
realized the value of this internal expertise and set up databases,
accessible through the rm’s intranet, that we can access and
search. But now the problem is – more often than not – there is
just so much of it!
We’re swamped with information! How many databases can
you access? How many documents can you read?! How many
colleagues’ brains and wisdom can you electronically pick?!
And this is actually not only a problem for the people looking for
information. In many organizations the providers of knowledge
1536
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Myths in management
are rewarded when others use their stuff, in the form of increased
respect in the company, heightened status, and sometimes even
in terms of hard cash after their annual performance evaluations.
How can you as a provider make yourself seen and heard in the
information quagmire?
Professors Morten Hansen and Martine Haas – at the time at the
Harvard Business School – examined this issue. They examined
the electronic databases of one of the Big 4 accountancy rms
and surveyed its 43 “practice groups” on their strategy of what
documents to upload and when. And they came back with some
pretty clear insights into what works and what doesn’t.
You have to understand that these different practice groups face
some simple but concrete choices: how selective are we going to
be in terms of the documents we upload; are we going to upload
pretty much everything we get our hands on, or are we only
going to put up a mere fraction of what we have? What is the
maximum number of les we would like to put on to the system?
Do we cover a fairly wide range of sub-topics or are we going to
be much more concentrated in terms of the subjects we cover?
The trade-offs are pretty clear; if you upload very few documents,
people can only access very few documents. But if you put up
many of them, potential users may be turned off, can’t see the
forest for the trees and turn their attention somewhere else in
disgust (while swearing at you for the sheer overload and making
rude hand gestures to their computer screen). But where does the
balance lie?
Hansen and Haas found out that where the balance lies depends
on what topic you are publishing on. If the practice group was
providing information on a topic that was being covered by
quite a few other groups (such as, “cost management”, “capital
and asset management”, “nancing and IPOs”), they were much
better off being very selective in what they put on their site.
Those who made few documents available quickly gained a
reputation as the group which always delivered high-quality stuff
without swamping you with irrelevant, low-quality distractions.
More people, as a result, accessed their pages.
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