In this new monthly feature, well offer just what the titlesays: some bright ideas for doing business better, making thingseasier on yourselves or your users, or simply impressing yourboss.

Some will be specific, others generalthink of them as 700-wordsuggestions. And if you have some of your own, send them to[email protected].

The Background
There was an old Xeroxcommercial in which the narrator (John OHurley, better known asSeinfelds J. Peterman) explains that, in this giant corporateoffice, one person has a question, another person knows the answer,but neither knows the other exists. Xerox, its implied, can helpyou manage your corporate knowledgeyour biggest assetso that thisdoesnt happen.

Managing your official corporate knowledge may not be easy todo, but it seems easy to understand: set up some kind of centralrepository for all your documents thats indexed and searchable byanyone with authorization. That way, if Joe is working on a projectand needs to know, say, some demographic figures, he can (intheory, anyway) find that Sheila has been working on just such astudy.

The problem with that system is that it only takes into accountofficial knowledgethe projects people and departments are (or havebeen) working on. But we all know that true corporate knowledgeisnt always official: Heather in customer service is a grammarwhiz, or Paul in accounting used to own a construction firm. If youdidnt know them, though, you wouldnt know to ask Paul about thedifferent kinds of PVC pipe, for example.

People know more than their job descriptions might imply. Truecorporate knowledge is more than whats in official documents andpublications. The most useful information might not be related towhat someone is paid to do, but instead to what that person does onthe side. Companies have a wealth of knowledge in their offices,but not at their fingertips.

The Bright Idea
To access more of thisundocumented corporate knowledge, consider creating a knowledgedatabase that every employee contributes to either automatically ormanually. For example, a corporate-wide Word macro might adddocuments to it by asking a user whether to add the current file tothe knowledge base. If you use network drives for most datastorage, simply index that. If not, and if privacy is not aconcern, index the documents on users hard drives. (If privacy is aconcern, have users keep all work-related documents in a specificfolder that is then indexed.)

There are other ways to add data. For example, Tacit KnowledgeSystems (www.tacit.com) offersKnowledgeMail, which captures and indexes all the e-mail sent bypeople in the company. If you need to know, for example, theeffects of PCBs, you might find that Karen in your Cleveland officehas been exchanging e-mail on the subject.

Users would have to understand exactly how the system works andwhy its there. You must establish a policy to never punish usersfor what they contribute, even if its an article on cat care (aslong as it doesnt violate the law). In fact, you might considersome sort of incentive program, rewarding employees for every timesomeone outside their department accesses a bit of theirknowledge.

Hopefully, employees would want to contribute. An added benefitof the system might be the possibilities for advancement it opensif, say, someone discovers that Jimmy in customer service is astatistical genius. It would be a way for people to show off whatthey know without looking like show-offs.

Done right, the end result of this is a relatively inexpensivestorehouse of your companys knowledge that anyone could access bysimply searching by keyword. A Web interface would cut down thelearning curve; make it part of your intranet.

Obviously there are issues beyond privacy. You dont wantsensitive material to leak into the system, and you dont wantsomeone to spend time pouring their bad poetry into it. Storagespace is cheap, but not free. Someone would have to spend time(that is, money) to set up and maintain the system. But thepotential benefits are enormous: the freer flow of informationthroughout the company, the teamwork it might foster, and theknowledge thatunlike what they say about the human mind90 percentof your corporate brain trust isnt going to waste.