Business Exposed154
In contrast, groups publishing on topics which were much less
widely covered (such as “Peoplesoft”, “hospital service delivery”,
or “call centres”) were better off providing a much wider range
of documentation, that readers could really sink their teeth into.
They developed the reputation that “for topic X you really need
to go to practice group A”, and ourished as a result.
Hence, the various suppliers of information within the company
competed with each other for the attention of the employees
looking for relevant knowledge. And, like in any market, they
needed to adapt their strategy based on the specic product they
were offering.
When knowledge hurts
So there can be such a thing as too much knowledge. And having
knowledge can also harm.
Over the past decade or so, companies have been told till it was
a nuisance that their knowledge is their ultimate (if not only)
source of competitive advantage. They have been encouraged –
by management gurus, academics, and management consultants
alike – that they should invest in knowledge development,
protect it, and make sure it gets identied, codied, and even put
on the balance sheet.
The advice was to carefully identify best practices and make sure
that you have systems that help these practices to be shared
throughout the organization. This way, you will make optimal
use of the great good and surely a healthy return will follow – or
so the preachers said.
Many companies responded, as advised, by setting up internal
systems that could be used to store and access all sorts of
documents, as well as systems to aid the identication of experts
in the organization and ways to contact them for advice.
But have these knowledge management systems turned out to be
as good as was promised to us? Well . . . let’s say that a few caveats
have emerged.
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Myths in management
Because what we sort of forgot in the torrent of knowledge
euphoria is that this stuff can also come at a cost. The cost
of actually nding it, for example, in the jungle of corporate
databases, but also the cost that comes with the fact that reusing
prior knowledge doesn’t necessarily make you very original. And
that’s a problem, especially when you need to stand out from
the crowd.
Martine Haas and Morten Hansen also examined the use of
internal knowledge systems by teams of consultants who were
trying to win sales bids. They measured to what extent these
teams accessed electronic documents and how much they sought
personal advice from other consultants in the rm. They gured
that, surely, accessing more knowledge must be helpful, right?
But they proved themselves wrong; to their surprise they found
that the more internal electronic databases that were consulted
by these teams, the more likely they were to lose the bid! Likewise
for seeking advice from colleagues. This effect was especially
pronounced for very experienced teams. These guys were much
better off relying on their own expertise than trying to tap into
experiences by others, whether it was in the form of electronic
stuff or external advice.
Haas and Hansen gured that the opportunity costs of accessing
all this prior knowledge must be huge; big enough to offset any
potential benets. Searching through the plethora of documents
and soliciting advice from colleagues actually stopped the teams
from making substantial investments into putting together a
truly original and suitable proposal.
Things were even worse when competing rms were simultane-
ously bidding for the same lead, and so being able to differentiate
yourself from these rivals became crucial. In these cases, utilizing
prior knowledge seemed to lead teams to develop cookie-cutter
solutions when being original and innovative was what was
really needed. As a result, they lost the bid.
The only times that a team beneted from accessing internal
knowledge sources was when it concerned a very inexperienced
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