The Kraken Wakes

March 2, 2001, 03:33 PM —  CIO — 

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT'S dirty little secret: However much you invest in high-tech knowledge banks, employees in search of an answer tend to make their first port of call the folks they know from the water cooler.

Giant consultancy Pricewaterhouse-Coopers is no different, concedes Julia Collins, its London-based head of global knowledge management. While PWC has considerable investment in formal knowledge management databases, the Kraken, an informal and unofficial Lotus Notes e-mail list, has been garnering more attention lately. Named after a mythological sea monster in a poem by Lord Tennyson, the Kraken is a sort of global glue, sharing knowledge across national borders.

Q: What exactly is the Kraken?

A: It's a discussion database -- but one that works through e-mail. It's there every morning when you log in, and you look at it if you've got time, and you don't look at it if you haven't. It builds connections to people in very diverse parts of the world who do each other favors by providing information. It doesn't compete with our more formal knowledge management systems; it's more additive. The formal knowledge management systems capture and share explicit information -- and generally information that is well documented and formatted. With the Kraken, people ask questions; other people answer those questions. Everybody on the mail list sees all the traffic: the questions and responses, and the responses to those responses.

Q: Who uses it? And for what?

A: About 600 people are on the list at the moment. They tend to be reasonably senior people, usually asking quite complex questions: "I'm trying to do this particular thing -- has anyone done it?" or "Where have we done it, and what did we encounter?" That kind of thing. And they tend to ask those questions after they have exhausted the easier options, especially within their own countries. Alternative approaches to capturing knowledge, such as post-engagement reviews, don't really replace the need to chat through a problem. For that, the Kraken is very good. The information passed is more informal and context specific than the documented knowledge that we hold in most of the databases.

Q: Was it complicated to set up?

A: It was really, really straightforward to set up. It's a simple mail group under Lotus Notes. To be added to the mail list, you just send a request asking to be added. There wasn't any prior approval required to set it up, and it doesn't really require funding. It just works.

CIO

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world

I like it!
Post a comment
The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
peer-to-peer

jfruh
Apple syncing patent can't come soon enough

pasmith
New Twitter features borrow from 3rd party clients

Esther Schindler
Open Source Changes the Software Acquisition Process

mikelgan
How to set up continuous podcast play on the new iTunes

David Strom
Five important Windows 7 mobility features

sjvn
Guard your Wi-Fi for your own sake                        

Sandra Henry-Stocker
Grepping on Whole Words

 

Sidekick: The Good News & the Bad News
Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
- mburton325

Join the conversation here

The Daily Tip

The Daily TipQuick, practical advice for IT pros. Made fresh daily.

Hot tips:

Want to cash in on your IT savvy? Send your tip to tips@itworld.com. If we post it, we'll send you a $25 Amazon e-gift card.

Newsletters

Subscribe to ITWORLD TODAY and receive the latest IT news and analysis.

I would like to receive offers via email from ITworld partners.
By clicking submit you agree to the terms and conditions outlined in ITworld's privacy policy.
Featured Sponsor

AISO founders envisioned a Web hosting company that was environmentally friendly. While the company employed energy-efficient innovations like solar panels, its infrastructure produced unacceptable power and cooling requirements. Find out how AISO leveraged AMD technology to overcome their challenge in this case study white paper.

In this whitepaper, Scalar explores the opportunity to change the landscape with respect to mission critical databases built around Oracle. Leveraging technologies such as Linux, high-end commodity processing power and Oracle RAC technology to architect, design, build and maintain database infrastructure that delivers maximum availability, reliability and performance at a fraction of traditional cost.

On a typical day, weather.com, the Web site for The Weather Channel in Atlanta, serves up between 15 million and 20 million page views. But in September 2004, when back-to-back hurricanes ransacked Florida, the peak traffic on one day more than tripled: over 70 million page views by more than 7 million unique visitors. Read the full success story now.

Marketplace