Gamma Corporation

Case Study by Ruben Canlas Jr.

Gamma Corporation is a large Asian company that provides business intelligence to different industries. Its products include providing benchmark surveys and analysis, business process outsourcing, software consultancy, and general management consultations. Their clients are big businesses and governments around the world. In 2000, its new president Bill Gonzales realized that to compete more effectively in a fast-changing environment, the company needed to implement knowledge management (KM). Gonzales instituted some changes, major of which was a reorganization that led to the creation of a VP-KM (Vice President - KM). The company also underwent a review of its vision and mission. Originally, the company mission was Providing high quality, missioncritical consultation services. Gonzales and his management team realized that their main line of work required high-level knowledge (business intelligence) that in turn also generated knowledge products (the different publications they sold). This framework led to realizations like the need to generate new consulting opportunities in various industries. Hence, the strategic management team revised the company mission to Providing high quality, mission-critical knowledge to knowledge companies. The management team defined a 5-year plan to implement KM and encouraged staff to take part in our knowledge journey, because your success will be the companys success. Two employees were particularly eager to start their KM projects: Chona Asis, the head of IT and Albert Carpio, a senior consultant in the company. Before year 2000 ended, Asis and Carpio worked together to create a KM tool called Gamma Chameleon. The tool provided knowledge capture and sharing tools. It had a central document repository where staff could upload files. It had an online bulletin board that allowed posting and discussion of projectrelated questions. It had an electronic calendar, a lessons learned database, and a project information database. It even included a repository of standard memos and templates.

Our thrust for the Chameleon project was to anticipate all the KM needs of staff, stated Asis in the company newsletter. So we reviewed all existing software requests, identified those that were critical for knowledge generation and capture, and created software tools that could be reused by any department. To this Carpio also added, Our existing databases are now difficult to use because they exist in isolation of each other. We created a web-based tool that unifies these databases and allows people to access them via a web page. Asis and Carpio hoped to create a high profile, cure-all tool that would impress management and staff, and gain support. Chameleon would answer most of the needs of most departments. To generate more buy-in, Asis and Carpio began presenting the software to the departments, while the software was being developed. Attendees were impressed. Departments and project teams lined up to request Chameleon for themselves. One project team wanted an online forum that ran like YahooGroups. The team already had a YahooGroups mailing list but they disliked using a public tool and, besides, YahooGroups was an external tool that created more information islands. Another department wanted a unified document repository because its files were being shared in a network folder and staff tended to lose documents or mix up different versions of the same document. We want a repository where we can easily search for files, just like in Google, said the department head. Desiring to satisfy their customers and start gaining buy-in, the IT department began deploying Chameleon to the requesting parties. Manny Guerrero, the KM consultant they contracted for this project, protested at the shotgun approach. He said that it would be better to implement Chameleon in small steps and not to market it as everything to everyone. Asis and Carpio countered that people would only take notice if a project impressed them with lots of features. Guerrero grudgingly stepped back.

Gamma Case Study Copyright of Ruben Canlas Jr. - rubencanlas(at)gmail(dot)com

1 of 2

After a few months of using Chameleon, questions and issues began to come up. Chameleon was slow; staff got impatient waiting for pages to download. It was difficult to navigate. It had too many required fields to fill up. The Research Department wanted to customize their home page but could not do so easily. And when Research was finally able to customize their page, the changes cascaded to the web pages of all other departments using Chameleon, causing more confusion. To make matters worst, data entry angered users. After a couple of minutes, some users would see a cryptic error message: the screen would freeze and the information they painstakingly typed would disappear, forcing the disgruntled users to type everything again. As 2001 ended, users got frustrated with Chameleon. Complaints began to reach upper management, but the VP-KM position had not yet been filled, so no one in upper management was on top of the situation. The frontline stakeholders were left to slug it out among themselves. In one meeting, Rene Villegas, a non-techie project manager and senior consultant, reported that Search did not work. Chona Asis shot back: What do you mean Search is not working? It IS working! You enter a keyword, and it gives you results. That means its working! Villegas clarified that although search is working as Asis defined it, the search results being produced were not relevant. I was expecting Google-like relevance, Villegas said. Villegas is known in the organization as a strong character and a tough customer, just like Asis. The incident created a strong clash between IT and customers like Villegas. Unknown to many, Villegass frustration stems from a historical problem. In 2000, Villegas was also eager to start a KM initiative. He formed a community of practice and the team realized that it needed an online tool so that members from different time zones and locations could easily log in and keep in touch. The online tool would contain a database of projects they were handling, the statuses of these projects, and a forum to discuss project problems. Villegas had a budget to hire a software developer, but had to seek approval from IT. IT told Villegas about

the Chameleon project and asked Villegas to wait for the first version of Chameleon, which was due in a few months. So Villegas stopped his initiative and got Chameleon. As 2002 passed, Asis and Carpio became increasingly defensive about Chameleon. She wrote an analysis paper saying that departments who requested Chameleon were not willing to assign staff who would update content. Carpio for instance stated in a report, How will Chameleon become useful at all if the departments who requested it are not even uploading fresh content? Asis said, Our job was to provide the KM tool. The content is the responsibility of the respective departments and users. Villegas and other users countered that they could not update Chameleon because it was difficult to use. Asis struck back by saying that departments actually simply hired contractual staff to update content. Once the contract of the staff expired, no one was left to manage/update Chameleon. This made the information stale. In 2003, the VP-KM position was finally filled by George del Rosario. Del Rosario learned about project Chameleon and conducted interviews with the various personalities involved. Del Rosario then sat and thought about the situation. GUIDE QUESTIONS 1. What was supposed to happen in the project? What did or did not happen? 2. What do you think caused the differences between expected and actual results? 3. How would you avoid this problem in the future? 4. If you were in Del Rosarios position, what would you do to move forward?

Gamma Case Study Copyright of Ruben Canlas Jr. - rubencanlas(at)gmail(dot)com

2 of 2