1.
Introduction
The taxi drops us
next to the Grande Arche that dominates the sector of Paris known as La
Defense, the heart of France’s industrial elite. The air is crisp on this
November morning, the revolving door that stirs us into the stainless steel
building cools it even more as we find ourselves in front of a receptionist
who sits amiably at what otherwise would pass as a street vendor’s designer
kiosk. It is shocking orange. She stops chatting with a spiked-haired and
tattooed young man to greet us with a broad smile. We later conclude that the
spiked hair sits atop a programmer’s brain because anything else would be
insulting to the context. Framing this scene are black on white walls in a cow
motif sprinkled with grayscale photos, all of which embrace 6 canvass chaises
longues in 6 colors which themselves surround a silver coffee table of
the free-form variety. We have entered the universe of a (maturing) start-up:
the address is 4 Place des Vosges, Paris La Défense, and we have stepped into
the world of Valtech (http://www.valtech.com).
The receptionist
announces our presence and we take the stainless steel elevators deeper into
Valtech territory. The colours and patterns on the
walls of the fourth floor are no less striking than those in the entrance. We
pass an expresso bar as Valtech’
s Chief Knowledge Officer guides us to the glass-enclosed conference room and
invites us to sit on orange stools that do, in fact, serve well as chairs
because of two little arms that discreetly embrace the small of the back. This
may be a designer environment, but it seems to pay attention to the people
that enter it.
Michel
Ezran smiles as he untangles LAN cables that spout from the middle of
the conference table and plugs in his notebook. He sits back and says,
“We’re happy to talk about KM in Valtech but beyond
the academic value of publishing a case, I’d like to get some business
benefits as well. Let’s talk about the dissemination plan.” This, it turns
out, is consistent with one of the company’s core values:
Valtech is all about emerging technologies and business benefits. The
formal mission statement reads: We are dedicated to creating value from
technology. Value and Technology are the grammatical as well
as the commercial roots of Valtech. Its value
proposition has shaped impressive growth since 1993: the company has nearly
doubled its number of employees each year (reaching 1,000 in 2001), retained
and extended its intellectual capital
and expanded operations across 6 countries. Valtech’s
IPO was offered at € 7.35 on 13 April 1999 and less than a year later its
stock was selling at € 37,70 on France’s Nouveau Marché. None of the company’s
annual reports have shown a loss nor less than an 86% increase in turnover.
This impressive
record is on track as we speak but things are not completely serene.
“Formalizing KM
was a natural evolution for us, it’s working but unevenly around the company
and we’re wondering what we should do next. This office now
has 300 employees instead of 30; the company has about 1,000 and things have
changed.” (Ezran)
2.
Valtech
Jean-Yves Hardy, Olivier Cavrel and Eric Mouilleron founded
Valtech in 1993 with the objective of developing a highly profitable business,
not to pursue a passion for technology. Rather than experts in emerging
software technologies, they describe themselves as sufficiently informed to
perceive the needs, trends and potential business benefits of a fast-moving
techno-business environment.
The initial
business concept focused on importing new information technologies into the
French market from other parts of the world. North America, in particular, was
developing software technologies in the early 1990’s that were relatively
unknown in France, hence indicating an unexploited market that seemed rich
with promise. Valtech began by selling object-oriented technology products and
offering training services that accompanied the sales function. With agility,
the company identified and then embraced successful new technologies as soon
as they emerged, adding products such as Corba, OMT,
Java and EJB to its portfolio.
Valtech designed its approach to training services such that customers became
relatively autonomous in the use of a technology once they completed a course.
It also began to expand its core business during this period by introducing
consulting services – a logical extension of sales and skills transfer in the
product range.
From the
mid-1990’s Valtech doubled its staff each year, opened new locations, expanded
its core business (training services), increased its consulting activity and
reduced the volume of software it distributed until stopping this activity in
1998. The Valtech brand was established at that point, the industry growing
and the business volume for this company – then viewed as one of France’s new
industrial sweethearts –outstripped its human resources.
It may be said
that Valtech bypassed adolescence and entered a corporate maturity phase only
five years after its founding. This passage to maturity was marked, in
particular, by the decision to abandon product sales and focus exclusively on
two fundamentals: (1) knowledge acquisition (high internal expertise,
accomplished in a variety of ways) and (2) knowledge transfer (profitable
dissemination of internal expertise, accomplished primarily through training
and consulting services).
The following
year, 1999, marked a turning point as the company began an expansion strategy
that would be paired with the launch of its IPO. On April 13 Valtech was in
the national spotlight as it offered 830,000 shares at € 7.35 on the Nouveau
Marché in Paris and raised ~ € 6.1 million. The IPO was well received by
investors who over subscribed the offer by 1,200% in less than a week (Les
Echos, 1999). Valtech’s Chief Acceleration Officer,
Eric Mouilleron, commented that, "The offering of Valtech stock in France
will support our future acquisition strategy. The country managers in each
market have a shopping list, and acquisitions will start to take place shortly
after the IPO” (http://www.valtech.com/pressrelease).
Mergers and
acquisitions began with USA-based Expede Inc., a technology services company
that specialized in distributed systems development. Press headlines in March
1999 read, “Valtech extends global leadership positioning in advanced
technology consulting” (M2 Presswire, 1999) and Jean-Yves Hardy, Valtech’s
President, stated, “Expede has a proven project delivery process and a
staff with extensive advanced technology experience. The combination of
expertise, market position and technical assets made the acquisition an
obvious one for Valtech” (Anonymous, M2 Presswire, 1999), The Expede
operation became a template as the company swelled from 150 employees across 6
locations in 1999 to over 1,000 employees across 6 countries and 12 locations
by the end of 2001.
3.
Managing Valtech
From 1993 to 1998
Valtech assembled young and dynamic people who wanted to work in the
information society’s avant-garde, and doubled their numbers each year. This
collection of youthful expertise, the company’s own youth as an entity, the
technological frontiers it navigated and other factors combined to produce the
Valtech culture: an ensemble of rules, routines, systems, structures and a
thick layer of psychosocial expectations that can be characterized by the
following:
·
Personal commitment to
work
·
Company commitment to
individuals
·
Agility with new
technology and avant-garde business
·
Informality and community
·
Speed
The early Valtech
was informal to the point of being unstructured. While it stocked itself with
IS and sales expertise, for example, it had added only one administrative
employee to shoulder HR and accounting functions by 1998. Corridors and
offices, on the other hand, were animated by employees looking for the
expertise needed to make a project work because, “…you simply did whatever
it took to get the job done” (Paul, consultant). Recruitment was a
feelings-based process, career development an organic affair and turnover
unheard of … not only because Valtech had trouble finding enough of the
right people, but also because the people it employed found a comfortable
fit with its knowledge-intensive organization. Policies and procedures
existed, but not on paper: they stirred through the company culture and were
absorbed on an experience basis. When a newcomer asked about an operating
policy the general response was, “There are no rules, but everyone knows
them” (Franck Halmert, Knowledge Assets Manager). The majority of
employees were passionate about their work but the other message was also
clear: only full commitment was admitted and the pace was fast.
This portfolio of
technological, pedagogical and human competencies wove together a distinctive
competitive edge for Valtech. The challenge, known by all, was to create
customer value by applying expertise and transferring skills. Valtech and its
employees were constantly working to stay on the leading edge of new
developments because its technological and business environment moved fast,
and obsolescence was swift and costly. But the company had few financial
worries, was expanding and seemed to stay on top of its situation. Motivation,
enthusiasm, challenge and initiative were the hallmarks of work during this
period.
Around 1999
Valtech began confronting new internal challenges, occasioned by continuous
growth on all fronts and a shifting business environment. The leadership
worked to maintain the company’s sense of community, and it continued to value
the motivation and loyalty of its staff. But the organization was becoming
more hierarchical despite itself and as Jean-Pierre explained, “It’s hard
to organize a nice, company-oriented weekend with the group when you have
Sweden, America and South Korea in the equation.” Valtech thus began to
employ vision and mission as a partial antidote to its growing complexity and
dispersion. The management style remained active: the founders were hands-on
and kept the business model clear: reconciling business objectives with
technology solutions. The Valtech Way was prescribed, which included
leading-edge expertise, enabling clients through knowledge transfer,
opportunistic development and business agility.
4.
KM in Valtech
Knowledge has
always been Valtech’s only real asset. From its inception the company’s core
activity consisted in mapping new technologies, determining their potential,
developing internal expertise and then applying it to the marketplace. This
expertise was (a) repatriated to Valtech and (b) injected into new or
developing product markets. In doing so, the company was also learning (c) how
to capture and transfer skills and (d) how to deliver customized solutions to
its clients. Valtech’s intellectual capital therefore grew in single loops
and double loops: it learned about technologies, products and markets
(single loops), but it also learned how to continue learning (double loops) (Argyris
& Schön, 1978). While the typical Valtech engineer of this period learned and
transferred what (s)he learned, the company learned from the
acquisition/transfer process and created a secondary
stockpile of company-specific intellectual assets. “I think you could explain
some of it this way,” said Michel Ezran, and Figure 1 emerged from the
conversation that followed.
Figure 1: The Valtech
Learning Environment
These knowledge
assets were unformalized: they existed and their existence was acknowledged,
but between 1993 and 1998 no systems or structures were dedicated to their
management. Informal discussions, collaborative work, hallway encounters,
team-based projects and drinks after work were the managerial method.
Knowledge assets were therefore deeply embedded in everyday action. Emergent
routines assembled new technology-based, employee-rooted knowledge assets;
consulting teams applied these assets with (not to) clients; client
engagements generated meta-knowledge on how to transfer or install the
expertise; the employee’s increased knowledge was brought back into the
company. Small numbers, geographic proximity and a high level of
professionalization allowed consultants to know who knew what in the
company and how to access the expertise when necessary. At the beginning of
1999 Valtech’s 151 employees were spread across 5 offices in 3 countries and
the spontaneous community it had once been was changing. Interactions were
less impulsive due to size and dispersion; routines that had been the
signatures of community spirit were fading; business leverage and
capitalization were entering the management vocabulary.
Against this
backdrop, top management decided in early 1999 that the position of R&D
manager – until then focused on the development of training materials – would
be transformed into that of Chief Knowledge Officer with a budget representing
7% of the company’s turnover (considered as an expense) and reporting directly
to the CEO. A month later the position of Asset Manager was created and
charged with capitalizing on training know-how and expertise. The 2 people
that assumed these roles thus formed the nucleus of Valtech’s formal KM
initiative. Neither knew of Knowledge Management as a domain of study and
practice at the time, but their situation took on the contours of a
now-familiar logic: the CKO would focus on knowledge formalization in the
consulting function, while the Assets Manager would mine the training function
for greater returns.
Their first 6
months were devoted to structuring a lessons-learned system that would capture
the meta-knowledge acquired by consultants during a client engagement. Each
client solution, they reasoned, was a source of fast-decay experience that
could be formalized, codified and made accessible for genuine business
benefits. They also began structuring the company’s ensemble of training
expertise, a body of content and pedagogy that varied across topics, client
populations and geography.
The results were
mixed. Despite Valtech’s communicative culture, middle managers baulked at the
idea of adding their know-how to a “database” because, in large part, it
required time. The different operating styles and cultural expectations in
offices outside France also complicated the task. A standardized production
process for training material was established, on the other hand, and the
portal my.valtech.com was launched in July 1999, which web-enabled the
work of the KM team. Valtech employees now had access to commercial and
technical documents for re-use, learning and support.
The KM movement
was now underway and gaining speed. Its manifestation in my.valtech.com
was important as a sign that things were in motion; as a tool that consultants
could actually use in their daily work, and as a communications vehicle that
facilitated corporate information flow. “I think this early portal sped up
the integration of acquisitions and helped our revenue stream by making it
easier for people to service our clients, and I think it was eventually seen
that way. But not immediately,” said the CKO in 2002. A Denver-based R&D
lab was also launched with the objective of merging French content and
American pedagogical know-how. The goal was to develop leading-edge training
packages for consultants, nested in a library that was consistent from one
pedagogical unit to another. The CKO also published a standardized project
management method – the Valtech Unified Process – that was aimed at the
delivery of e-business projects on time and on budget.
By the end of 1999
the KM team numbered 10 people and results were satisfying, at least in
France. Based on this, Valtech’s KM strategy was formalized: contribute to
business value-added by capitalizing on skills, know-how, expertise and past
experience. This emphasized the capture and re-use of know-how from the
company’s two core activities, training and consulting (Figure 2).
my.valtech.com
provided access to this intellectual capital, a portfolio of model projects
(exemplars) and advice from qualified experts. Portals of all kinds require
the expert and tailored content that makes a visit worthwhile, however, and
this challenge was attacked by creating KM Correspondents in each
Valtech location: a group of volunteers who would promote the KM effort,
capture local content and assist in its formalization (Figure 3).
my.valtech.com developed into an icon of the Valtech culture, leveraged on
three levels: (a) corporate life, by sharing news and contacts; (b) competency
development, by facilitating learning; and (c) productivity, by displaying
content, artifacts and exemplars.
Figure 2: The Valtech KM
Strategy
Nonetheless,
problems did exist. One difficulty involved content management because
contributions remained uneven and difficult to obtain. KM
Correspondents were recruited on a relationship basis; their contributions
were voluntary and the returns from their efforts, personal. Hence,
my.valtech.com’s lifeblood – front line insights and experiences –
remained outside of traditional management processes, including remuneration
and time allocation. But the concept was in keeping with the Valtech Way
(skill transfer through collaborative work) and therefore in conceptual
harmony with the culture.
Figure 3: The Valtech KM
Network
By the end of 2000
an assessment of the KM function and the company’s emerging needs chartered
the structure of a new portal, defined around five objectives.
·Productivity, through the access,
transfer, retrieval and re-use of information and expertise;
·Efficiency, by providing access to
the right information at the right time and facilitating
communication flows;
·Visibility, aimed at clients
(extranets) and Valtech employees (intranets);
·Capitalization, the systematic and
methodological accumulation of intellectual assets;
·Client value-added, through high
quality service delivery, access to Valtech know-how and empowered client
relationships.
The company was
entering a period of financial turbulence, however, due to the worldwide
decline of technology shares and Valtech’s aggressive M&A policy. Top
management continued its support and launched the project, but restricted the
overall KM budget to 4% of turnover, reassigned 5 members of the KM team to
other functions and closed the Denver R&D lab.
While
my.valtech.com continued its role in the company, project@valtech
was prototyped by a project team with representation from each location and
user group, and its introduction was supported by a change management program
that included the following:
·
Meetings with key actors
to plan the project’s deployment;
·
Surveys to measure
satisfaction and perceived problems during the pilot phase;
·
Think Orange days (Valtech’s
official color) and internal newsletters designed to attract the interest of
employees:
·
Meetings and training
sessions, held throughout the organization, aimed at fast applicability to
everyday work and ease-of-use;
·
Surveys to gather
information and develop the user base, directed at the KM network, consultants
and middle managers;
·
An email campaign that
kept employees updated as to the project’s objectives, benefits and
development;
·
A periodic review with
top management
The adoption of
project@valtech
was phased in over time and 6 months after its introduction, its
utilization was widespread. “The change management program was a big
factor, something you don’t give enough attention to normally. But in our case
it got everybody on track and was a big key to success,” according to
Bernard (consultant). The CKO agreed and added, “It’s clear from our
experience, and hundreds of our consulting assignments, that the world’s best
technology goes nowhere without the right kind of organizing around it.”
The KM team began
to analyze return on investment for project@valtech at the end of 2001.
It searched for results in two broad categories:
Objective and measurable:
including timesaving in accessing and delivering information, re-use of
knowledge, systematic capitalization of experience, user satisfaction;
Subjective and
perceived: including work methods in project teams, faster business
development, increased collaboration between Valtech offices, better project
management.
As of May 2002,
results were abundant and encouraging for the second category but difficult to
assess for the first. The KM team found it devilishly hard to link hard,
quantified evidence to the positive but subjective judgments of the KM
initiative. It assessed “clicks” and user contributions but judged these types
of measures to be intermediate, as opposed to fundamental, appraisals.
The time of
innocent spontaneity passed with the introduction of project@valtech
and the KM team positioned itself at the heart of Valtech’s business. It
continued to organize return-on-experience sessions, for example, “…but
only in the late afternoons so that they didn’t interfere very much with
client schedules,” said Franck Halmert. The work of KM correspondents was
legitimized with objectives assigned to local management and KM-specific
elements integrated in the job descriptions of correspondents themselves.
“Our KM program is built around investment in sales support channels, in
services on the company intranet, in a network of active correspondents in
each office, in a strong and continuous training program supported by the
training department” (Valtech annual report, 2000, p. 8).
In early 2002 the
company announced organic growth of 15% and revenues of € 121.5 million for
2001, a 42% increase over 2000. The slogan, think globally and act locally,
seemed to be working since consultants were using Valtech’s international
network and the company’s position in most of its markets was strengthening.
The KM team began
integrating my.valtech.com and project@valtech into a new and
more comprehensive portal. Results after 3 years of work are concrete, uneven
and encouraging. The third generation portal is anticipated by line employees
because they now expect real benefits that will help them deliver real
results. The KM network is disappearing into the company’s normal everyday
activity – the best of all worlds. Some clients praise the access to
information and experience that quickly deployed extranets provide in
consulting assignments.
The major issue
remains KM’s ROI. “Fundamentally speaking, we are skeptical, skeptical
regarding quality, regarding KM. But intellectual and business logic has
provoked us to develop the KM program and it’s making sense,” said
Jean-Yves Hardy. “But there is a critical need for measurement. We are at
the parting of the ways: either we continue investing in KM or we stop. Only a
clear ROI will help us make the right decision.” Common measures, such as
frequency of use and client satisfaction, are deemed inadequate because the KM
team embraces a more strategic perspective on its work. “For Valtech, the
future of KM will be defined by KM-based products that are replicable and
easily transformed into models for clients. We also need easy and reliable
measurement systems, and easy ways to port our KM tools into extranets that
wrap clients and providers together in a consulting assignment,” said
Hardy. He continued, “We want to develop a very pragmatic firm where we can
provide instant access to exemplary projects and highly qualified expertise.”
5.
Discussion
The research for
this case history employed an ethnographic methodology over 9 months (ending
Spring 2002) and included informal observation, structured interviews,
corroboration, textual/archival analysis and photographic recording. The
authors had full access to company records and personnel, including Board
members, the CKO and his staff. This paper is a significantly abridged version
of the full case history. It nonetheless describes, we would argue, a company
that is currently an excellent example of KM-based strategic commitment and
organizational design, but which arrived at this state as a result of
competitive pressures and new organizing logics.
Valtech optimized
its product range and service delivery by reorganizing according to Knowledge
Management principles at the group level. In the company’s collective mind, it
was “pulled” to this policy by business necessity and organizational
exegesis rather than “pushed” by academic or consulting trends. This,
we argue, departs from a number of other cases in the literature where the
“hype” surrounding KM seems to have driven a conversion experience that caused
one or more top managers to impose strange new systems and structures on an
unwilling organization.
After an initial
period where informal knowledge sharing featured in its culture, Valtech
formally embraced KM to manage its fast-paced development, achieve scale
efficiencies and reach higher levels of business performance. KM at Valtech is
squarely focused on business performance, but relatively unique in that it
arose naturally (“organically,” in the words of its founder) as a result of
new organizing logics. This has been a “chemin
faisant” in the mind of this company or, from the French, a path it traced as
it navigated its way forward. “KM is federative for the brand, the
corporate culture, and defines our business model,” said Valtech CEO JY
Hardy in April 2002.
This case history
presents 9 elements that both academic insight and Valtech’s experience
advance as important factors in a KM initiative:
·Commitment. Valtech’s KM initiative
was the product of several dynamics but from the perspective of sustainable
organizational development, top management’s decision to commit the company
and its resources was clearly a key. Among the formal and informal symbols of
this commitment in evidence, the KM team’s direct report to the CEO is
prominent.
·Strategy & integration. Flowing from
the above, the company formulated and refined a KM strategy that featured the
integration of KM structures and systems in its everyday business. KM was
firmly linked to business benefits.
·Resources & infrastructure. Valtech
allocated resources commensurate with the objectives of its KM effort (budget,
staff, infrastructure). The KM team numbered up to 10 people and financing has
varied between 4% and 7% per year of the company’s ever-growing turnover.
·“The way we do things here.” A
KM-friendly culture earmarked the company’s working environment, often forming
around the conviction that knowledge was Valtech’s only real asset. The
company exercised in this way Argyris’s prescription for the learning
organization: technical mastery combined with effective teamwork, productive
client relationships and the meta-ability to critique internal practices (Argyris,
1991; Schein 1994).
·Task and Process. Edgar
Schein (1994) has commented that most academics and managers hold the
assumption that, “…management deals with hard things - data, money, bottom
lines, payoffs, production, competition, structure. And it is even better if
these hard things can be quantified.” But he goes on to say that learning
organizations pay at least as much attention to process – the way they
achieve results. Valtech’s management achieved a balance on this count,
concerning itself as much with the soft and subjective ways it organized
itself as with the hard results it obtained.
·Constructive agitation.
Valtech made growth, development and improvement a part of its culture. This
permeated KM initiatives such as the Denver R&D lab and Valtech University,
which, though considered imperfect, were attempts to meet the needs of
motivated engineers who needed to stay at the top of their fields.
·Tools & technologies. Valtech
combined cutting-edge KM systems with change management and effective
organization. my.valtech.com became a backbone of corporate
communication partly due to effective portal/intranet technology, and partly
because it was well adapted to the company. project@valtech took the
next step by deeply embedding itself in the core business (giving consultants
the advantage of offering project-based extranets to clients, for example).
·Single-loops,
double-loops. The company valued, and the KM effort focused on, the
meta-knowledge that developed when a Valtech engineer worked out a solution
with a client. Single-loop learning refers to the simple acquisition of
knowledge in such situations, while double-loop learning implies, “…cognitive
rules or reasoning people use to design and implement their actions”
(Argyris & Schön, 1978).
·Assessment. The evaluation of
results stamped each step of Valtech’s KM development and the evaluation
process was always anchored in business objectives. Quantitative and
qualitative criteria have been employed. Though considered inadequate, the KM
team used these measures to shape its systems, structures and organizing
principles on as clear a view as possible of the needs of its client (Valtech)
and the impact of its efforts.
Ryder and Wilson
(1997) have observed that complex systems evidence a natural tendency toward
decentralization of information and control. This, they write, “…holds true
for a swarm of bees …, a market economy, or a learning infrastructure.” The 9
elements noted provide concrete examples of such decentralization, in service
of organizational effectiveness and business success. As a parallel, it is
interesting to note that each of these 9 elements fits comfortably in the
literature devoted to learning organizations. Kerka (1995), for
example, has written that the following are often considered important
characteristics of the learning organization:
·
Continuous opportunities
for individual and group learning;
·
Learning considered
essential to goal attainment;
·
Individual performance
linked with organizational performance;
·
Rules, routines and
systems that foster inquiry and dialogue;
·
A culture where people
consider it safe to share openly and take risks;
·
Creative tensions valued
as a source of energy and renewal;
·
Systems and structures
aimed at awareness of and interaction with the environment.
The 9 elements (Commitment
through Assessment) that were identified at Valtech are, however,
increasingly cited as key success factors or KM enablers by the
KM practice literature (Chauvel & Despres, 2002). Figure 4, which summarizes
the findings in this article, provides additional perspective on Valtech.
Phenomena refer to structural or functional conditions in a company that
are responsible, at some level, for the success or failure of a KM initiative.
Most of the 9 elements noted above are enablers in this regard.
Action refers to observable actions that range from broad, corporate
strategies to more individualized practices or behaviors. Organizational
action at the level of practices points to the development of an
infrastructure that is dedicated to the management of knowledge and includes
many of the systems, structures, routines, work habits and technologies noted
in the paragraphs above.
Figure 4: Dimensions of
Concern in Applied Knowledge Management
By Level we
refer to the units of social aggregation - individuals, groups, organizations,
cultures, environments - at which a company aims its KM initiative(s). In this
regard Valtech clearly has a wide embrace but seems particularly focused on
3 levels: groups and individuals within the company, and their external
business environment. The dimension Knowledge refers to the practical
issue of identifying useful knowledge and then putting it into effective
action. This remains a significant concern for Valtech and the KM team, which
has to date adopted a defacto policy of Utilitarianism (if it’s accessed by
our users, it must be useful and if it works with a client, it must be good).
The
dimension of Technology points to the tools and techniques that are
employed in KM and includes IS/IT solutions as well as human-social
technologies that are more concerned with the social psychology of organizing
a knowledge-based enterprise. On this count Valtech appears to be employing
IS/IT solutions that both arise from and are generative of new human-social
technologies, in a spiral of action that seems far from planned or
predetermined. The approach is tactical and focused on the short to medium
term. Finally, Outcomes concern the upshot of a KM initiative and, in
the vernacular, this dimension focuses on the ‘so what’ issue. Here, the words
of Valtech’s CEO are unequivocal: “… there is a
critical need for measurement. We are at the parting of the ways: either we
continue investing in KM or we stop. Only a clear ROI will help us make the
right decision.”
6.
Conclusion
The case history
has outlined Valtech’s (http://www.valtech.com)
journey from start-up to a multinational knowledge-intensive firm, tracing its
development and specifying the conditions that motivated its organizing along
KM principles. We have identified some of the systems, structures, phases of
development and successes/failures the company has encountered along this
path. Both external and internal observers have identified a number of
distinctive features in Valtech associated with KM phenomena, including
organizational culture, emergent routines, work rules, management styles,
adaptive and generative organizational learning, and autopoietic processes. It
can be said that Valtech’s experience with Knowledge Management is shaping its
history. Unknowingly, the company initially acted on KM principles in order to
cope and survive in its environment. Four years later its approach to KM was
formalized with strategies, resources and action. Today, and despite a lack of
concrete evidence, Valtech believes that its investment in KM is playing a
major role in the company’s success.
Appendix 1
Milestones in KM at Valtech
Early 1999:
creation of the CKO position
March 1999:
creation of the Asset Manager position
January - June
1999: formalization of the consulting function
Actors; Task
definition and mapping; Mapping of expertise and knowledge
Documentation;
January – June
1999: formalization of the training function
Actors; Training
course material; Content publications process
July 1999:
creation of my.valtech.com
July 1999:
creation of Denver R&D Lab
January 2000: KM
strategy formalized
January 2000: KM
tools disseminated
2000: creation of
KM Network and Correspondents
2000: retooling of
my.valtech.com
Early 2001:
decision to invest in a new KM portal
Mid-2001:
introduction of project@valtech and rollout of change management
program
End of 2001: new
policy and organizational role for KM Correspondents
January 2002:
my.valtech.com and project@valtech merged and integrated
References
Anonymous.
“France: Bourse - succès de l'introduction de Valtech au nouveau marché”,
Les Echos, 13 April 1999,
Anonymous.
“USA: Valtech - Valtech acquires Expede, Inc. in US”, M2
Presswire, 29 March 1999.
Argyris, C, 1991,
“Teaching smart people how to learn”, Harvard Business Review,
May/June, 69(3), pp 99-11.
Argyris, C. and
Schön, D. (1996) Organizational Learning II: Theory, Method and Practice,
Reading, Mass: Addison Wesley.
Argyris, C., &
Schön, D. A. (1978). Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action
Perspective. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Chauvel, D. &
Despres, C. (2002). “Survey research in Knowledge Management”, Journal of
Knowledge Management, 6(3).
Despres, C. &
Chauvel, D. 2000. “A thematic analysis of the thinking in Knowledge
Management”, in Charles Despres & Daniele Chauvel (Eds.), Knowledge
Horizons: The Present and the Promise of Knowledge Management. New York:
Butterworth-Hienemann.
Kerka, S. (1995)
‘The learning organization: myths and realities’ Eric Clearinghouse,
http://ericacve.org/docs/mr00004.htm
Ryder, M. and
Wilson, B. “From center to periphery: Shifting agency in complex technical
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