In today’s global economy, traditional assets such as land, labor and capital are no longer as effective in getting an edge on the competition. What really differentiates organizations today is their ability to use information to meet their objectives.
“To gain a sustainable advantage, organizations must continuously deploy innovative information management practices,” says Kevin Desouza, an assistant professor in the UW Information School and College of Engineering. “They need to build creative solutions for managing information, deploying technology, and enabling people to create and use information to the fullest extent.”
In 2005, the University of Washington Information School established the Institute for Innovation in Information Management (I3M) to promote innovative information management as a way to help organizations achieve their goals. “Organizations that manage information successfully will outperform their competitors and be leaders in their marketplaces,” Institute Director Desouza says. “I3M brings together industry and academic partners for the co-construction of problems and solutions, so we can better understand, create, and share innovative information management practices.”
I3M corporate partners—charter members Parsons Brinckerhoff and Washington Mutual Bank, and BlackRock Alternative Advisors, which bought founding member Quellos Group, LLC—provide financial support in exchange for access to the expertise of the I3M associates and other partners. The institute’s work concentrates on studying mission-critical needs facing organizations in information management, in addition to conducting high-quality theoretical research that advances scientific knowledge. Semiannual one-day symposia bring together I3M members and other industry representatives, faculty, students, and the practitioner community for creative dialog around current information management issues.
“The symposia always provide an interesting mix of very smart, creative people trying to tackle the same problems that we face in business and group dynamics,” says Parsons Brinckerhoff Leader of Knowledge Systems Chris Rivinus, who has participated in several of the symposia as a planner and a presenter. “We always walk away with at least one great idea, usually several, and these ideas are practical, things we can take back to PB and immediately apply.”
After each symposium, the I3M faculty—which also includes Michael Crandall, senior lecturer and chair of the Master of Science in Information Management (MSIM) program, and Bob Mason, professor and associate dean for research at the Information School—meet with their industry partners to begin planning the framework of the next session. “The topics for research are discussed and mutually agreed upon by the partners,” says I3M graduate assistant Subramaniam Ramasubramanian, a student in the MSIM program, who helps put the symposia together.
The fall sessions, usually organized and led by Information School faculty, focus on research and developing industry-academia collaborations, with faculty members presenting papers on I3M-funded research. The spring symposia, on the other hand, are usually organized and led by I3M industry partners, with the goal of learning from successful practices and leading practitioners.
“The spring symposium provides an opportunity to hear from our I3M partners about the challenges they face and the solutions they have implemented,” Desouza says. “This format fosters networking and sharing of best practices, as well as engaging academia and industry in identifying key problems and solutions. Dialoging and networking on critical challenges facing organizations in leveraging information and knowledge assets are the focus of the day.”
Representatives from Starbucks, Boeing, Microsoft, Alerts.com, Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, and other Puget Sound companies joined the I3M partners at the symposium on April 16, titled “Leveraging Ideas for Innovation.” J. Roberto Evaristo of the Knowledge Management Program Office of the 3M company delivered the keynote address, “How Innovation in Knowledge Management Is Enabling Organizational Innovation at 3M,” presenting his theory of expertise mapping, an innovative knowledge management methodology that pictorially depicts the depth and location of key areas of knowledge in an organization. At 3M, expertise mapping is creating new answers to traditional problems such as succession planning, post-acquisition integration, global key account management and global knowledge transfer.
Other presentations that day described new information management programs at Washington Mutual, BlackRock Alternative Advisors, and Parsons Brinckerhoff. Annie Searle, senior vice president, Enterprise Risk Services, headed a team of Washington Mutual information management professionals discussing WaMu’s Idea Market, a program for technology innovation with the goal of selecting and rewarding the best employee ideas while minimizing bureaucracy. Eric Larsen, managing director and head of the Information Systems Group for BlackRock Alternative Advisors, described the challenges of building collaborative and innovative information management cultures—motivating collaboration and the use of knowledge management systems, alignment of incentives, aligning innovation with change management efforts, and measuring the contribution of collaboration and innovation against business value.
Parsons Brinckerhoff, the international consulting engineering firm, made two presentations. PB Planning Manager Paul Arnold, an expert in transportation planning whose specialties are travel demand forecasting, operational analysis, geospatial analysis and visualization, discussed “Spatial and Temporal Visualization of Complex Information.” He presented examples from a variety of industries in which spatial and temporal data are being applied to common situations with compelling results. “When combined creatively, recent advances in GPS and spatial modeling tools not only provide great insight into the behavior and location of people and things in the past, but also what things will look like in the future, and how we can get there,” Arnold says. “In a very real way, you can now experience something before it’s created. My presentation will pay special attention to the benefits of four-dimensional modeling (3D + Time) and its applications.”
Chris Rivinus discussed changes Parsons Brinckerhoff made internally after a 2006 I3M research study provided an in-depth look at its corporate-sponsored communities of practice, called Practice Area Networks (PANs). As a result of the research, PB increased its support and redefined the focus of these communities in order to provide stronger and more consistent business value for the company.
The most important change suggested was reorganizing the PANs to better aggregate and catalog PB’s growing global knowledge base. “Parsons Brinckerhoff manages as many as 4,000 projects at a time, and more than half of our 10,000 employees work outside the United States,” Rivinus explains. “We created communities of practice years ago to facilitate informal collaboration and mentoring between experts in similar fields but were working on separate projects in separate locations. A lot of collaboration and knowledge exchange happens in these communities. We are now working to do a better job of capturing, storing and making the results of those collaborations available to the rest of the company. The PANs have produced consistent business value for more than a decade, and now I3M is helping us make those communities an even greater resource for our employees and clients.”
In addition to the industry presentations at the spring symposium, iSchool assistant professor Hazel Taylor presented a research proposal to I3M, seeking funding for a study on how organizations can improve their post-project review process to learn more from it. “There is increasing evidence that even when lessons learned are captured and stored, the knowledge transfer to other projects either fails to occur or is shallow and superficial,” Taylor says. “All too often, while some form of formal post-project review is conducted, it is more typically intended for a senior executive audience, rather than to spread information about the experience gained among other project management staff within the firm. Indeed, related research on post-project reviews in the construction industry highlighted that when these reviews were done, they were most often focused on blame assignment for what had gone wrong, rather than a constructive assessment of what could be learned.”
Taylor proposed to investigate post-project reviews in IT project organizations and their relationship to transfer of learning, particularly experiential learning, among project staff. “The specific aim is to examine the congruence between firms’ objectives for post-project reviews and their processes or practices for conducting these reviews, with the goal of highlighting which learning processes will best achieve the learning objectives,” she explains.
Taylor wants her study to bridge the gap between academic research and pragmatic application. “I3M, with its focus on bringing industry and academia closer together, seems an obvious place for my work,” she says. “In the IT sector, because both technology and the context of application are changing so rapidly, project managers typically face new, diverse, and ill-defined requirements for each project, and are required to manage their projects in rapidly changing conditions and under high time pressure. Understanding how best to draw out the lessons learned from completed projects and transfer these lessons to other project teams are critical issues for organizations today, and hence likely to be of significant interest to the I3M partners and other industry representatives.”
The semiannual I3M symposia not only reinvigorate the participants with practical ideas and fruitful networking, but also contribute valuable research to a relatively new field striving for recognition. “With a growing body of work, knowledge management is moving from the theoretical to the practical, from art form to science,” Rivinus says. “When best practices are in place, when you can take business value out of them, concepts are no longer theoretical, they are real. Each I3M symposium is adding to that body of work.”
For more information about the Institute for Innovation in Information Management (I3M), contact Kevin Desouza at iiim@washington.edu.