The Hindu Business Line : Create work and then sell it to someone else

"The recruiting and selection process was consuming a lot of engineering and management time," realised the company, and so decided to include a `final sales interview' with each of the potential hires, to talk about the company's technology and its potential. What was the result?

"The success rate rose dramatically," and soon the company had 35 employees, 30 of whom were into chip development.

That's from the `Extreme Packet Devices' example included in Cases in Entrepreneurship, by Eric A. Morse and Ronald K. Mitchell, from Sage (www.sagepublications.com) , published in partnership with the Richard Ivey School of Business.

"The important idea in this book is that entrepreneurs create new value through the creation of new transactions," states the preface. The old saying - that nothing happens until somebody sells something - is only partially true, aver the authors.

"Nothing in business happens until somebody creates some work and then sells it to someone else. In essence, when an individual creates a work for others, a transaction occurs."

Viewed thus, the `sales interview' was a wise move for the chip company, but it had a different predicament to handle too.

"A major investment area for companies designing ASICs was electronic design automation tooling for the engineers. One of the major problems in many start-ups was that the engineers often sat around waiting for tools to be available so that they could move ahead with their part of a project," reads the case. (For starters, ASIC is pronounced ay-sik, and is short for Application-Specific Integrated Circuit, a chip designed for a particular application, as www.webopedia.com explains.)

The company decides to invest heavily to provide the engineering staff with enough of the best tools available "so that tools would not be a constraint on time-to-market".

A $4-million agreement is struck with Synopsys - to provide whatever design automation tools Extreme needed at a particular time for 90 engineers. This gives the company great flexibility since the types of tools it required would depend on the stage of ASIC development.

Elsewhere in the book is the story of WaveRider and its LMS portfolio of products. "The LMS system had been designed to provide `last mile' wireless Internet access to a user," explain the authors.

"The `last mile' referred to the difficulties that various technologies faced in delivering Internet access to consumers."

One of the hurdles that the company had to face was `competitive noise in the market', or "unreachable promises made by the competition". This lengthened the sales cycle. How? "Noise frequently led customers to delay their decisions because they wanted to wait another two quarters for the `next version'." The company decided that its sales people had to work closely with product R&D staff "to keep up to date on the latest news".

Yet another case is about what started off as a small eight-person operation, "developing Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) hardware". The company realises that there is "an untapped market of small businesses currently using telephone lines for local and long-distance calling and broadband for Internet connections."

Useful read to guide real operations.

If only we knew...

THE co-founders and directors of No Doubt Research, Carl Davidson and Dr Philip Voss have written Knowledge Management to introduce you to `creating competitive advantage from intellectual capital'.

The book from Vision (www.visionbooksindia.com) has an interesting quote of Leo Platt on the back cover: "If only HP knew what HP knows, we'd be three times as profitable." That's a universal problem, you'd agree, so here's KM to help organisations "identify, activate, and apply the knowledge available to them".

Two lines from a poster, cited in the introduction are: "Computers: Fast. Accurate. Dumb. People: Slow. Sloppy. Smart." The pre-eminent source of `power' in the modern economy comes from the sharing of knowledge, say the authors, and remind that the source of such knowledge is people. Sharing is not for its own sake, but to "enable staff to carry out business processes faster, better, and at lower costs."

On how KM is `not about IT', the book explains that computers are certainly useful for storing, codifying, and communicating explicit knowledge, "but they are not as good at dealing with tacit knowledge, and next to no use when it comes to ensuring that staff actually internalise the knowledge available on the network".

Do you know the `thirty-three-and-a-third rule' of Thomas Davenport and Larry Prusak? It says that "if more than a third of the total time and money resources of a project is spent on technology, then it's an IT project and not a knowledge management one".

One of the most startling facts about IT is that there is very little evidence that it has had any measurable effect on your productivity, point out the authors.

"Whatever system an organisation adopts, it has to do more than simply accumulate information. If not, the amount of information in the system will quickly outstrip the ability of users to engage with it," caution Davidson and Voss.

The system has to actively synthesise, summarise, assess, and purge the contents, say the authors emphasising the need for `data reduction'. Another insight from the book is that effective KM needs to make it easy for staff to pull the knowledge they need from the system.

"The difference between pushed and pulled information is the same as that between just-in-case (JIC) and just-in-time (JIT) inventory control," note the authors.

"Successful KM can be seen as moving the organisation from storing information just in case it is needed by someone, somewhere, to an organisation that enables staff to access the knowledge they need just in time to solve the problems they confront."

A piece of sound advice is that without delaying KM till the next round of budget allocations are made, you should start from what you have. "Think about the way existing client databases, e-mail-based user groups, Web sites, and groupware could be adapted to enable better knowledge-sharing."

Try also this simple tip: Educate staff how to use existing systems better, because this is `a powerful but under-utilised' KM tool!

Essential addition to your knowledge.

Tailpiece

"When I wanted to read an Internet joke, the screen said, `The page cannot be displayed'!"

"Whenever the screen says, `The page cannot be displayed', I pull out the joke book from the drawer."

Books2Byte@TheHindu.co.in

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