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II.  GLOBAL CHANGE MANAGEMENT
INITIATIVE THROUGH KM PRACTICES

How do you undertake a global back-office process overhaul with
maximum cooperation and commitment without paralysing the
company in the process ?

Traditionally, a centralised management-led compliance and reporting system would have been undertaken, that is more commonly known as a matrix management model. Much has been written about this change strategy with only partially successful outcomes. But Xerox decided on a new way... and achieved its goals with only modest levels of pain in arguably far quicker time.

Xerox Corporation decided it had enough of internally-made systems. It wanted to transition to industry-standard systems. The goal was to establish a consistent, industry-standard office environment in all Xerox locations with improved corporate-wide ability to exploit new technology promptly.

The challenge was to persuade 38,000 people worldwide to retire their beloved workstations, many of which had been in service since the early 1980s. Legacy infrastructure worldwide needed to be retired by the end of the third year of transition. Simultaneous effort was to be made to to improve and expand the functionality of the new IT infrastructure.When fully functional, there would be 50 IT professionals responsible for managing 70,000 desktop workstations, nearly 1,200 servers, and networking hardware on 5 continents.

Xerox's approach ?

The key stakeholders will be a strategic functional community - a large group of IT professionals working at corporate headquarters and in the business units to manage the transition. Note that this in contrast to a cross-functional team that is centralised. It is a representative group of IT professionals throughout the company globally.

The strategic community was a corporate information-management planning group named the 'Transition Alliance.'

Unlike a task-oriented team, the strategic community established its own internal work processes, and its organizational structure was fluid whilst operating within the traditional organisational boundaries. It caputured just as much new work practice principles from their progressive actions as with the actions they completed. They were both a Doing and Learning community. They discovered and optimised change management principles and processes as they went, a Work-In-Progress group.

The level of member involvement was fluid and voluntary - the motivation was to participate actively based mostly on needs: to improve organizational performance, to learn, and to sustain professional identity. The key product to all this activity in an unpredictable environments was quality decision-making.

'It differs from a traditional team along a number of dimensions and
moreover, its characteristics are similar to those of a community of practice.

We believe that this structure is a new, important organizational phenomenon, of great use in a world of increasingly dispersed human resources where firms need to wisely leverage their intellectual capital.'
                                                                - Research team.

Specific Strategy

Homogenous in its makeup, the Transition Alliance would operate through face-to-face global conferencing and localised cascading interventions.

Information systems representatives from nearly all business units worldwide to meet and to brainstorm objectives, obstacles and strategies.

- An initial two-day conference,
- A follow-up conference at two months,
- Then follow-up conferences every 6 weeks.
- Action items noted, classified, assigned, and reviewed.

Maintenance issues : Through normal turnover, members from business units and headquarters rotated. Having around 50 official members, the community had a central core of about twenty members who attended 80 percent of the meetings. Depending on the agenda for the meeting, people outside of the core were invited. In addition, 250 systems professionals provided further input when required. The dedication of the core members led to it clearly having official, lasting status and recognition at Xerox.

Key Discovery : Proximity in Relationship -Communities perform properly only by face-to-face communication.

The researchers openly acknowledge that most communities do work this way. If some members could only attend every second meeting they were partially present in the other meetings via audioconferencing. Face-to-face interaction maintains a personal relationship essential for the functioning of a community that cannot be developed in any other way.

STRATEGIC COMMUNITY
QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE RESULTS

• Motivated members and associates powerfully to learn and commit to process changes by generating and sustaining powerful behaviours and attitudes.
• Provided high-quality, validated solutions to issues, through best practice sharing and problem-resolution processes.
• Adopted speedily never-ending new developments in hardware and software
• Filtered concisely and timely critical operational knowledge to multitude of business units
• Managed their complex infrastructure very effectively, receiving a Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award.4 for outstanding documentation.
• Received top internal award from Xerox's CEO for being one of the
  top performing teams for achieving the initial infrastructure transition on time and within budget.
  
  

Xerox used the premier learning vehicle in knowledge management practice, a community of practice, to successfully achieve a global infrastructure overahaul. It primarily met face-to-face at frequent global update conferences to drive the changes. It's work-in-progress methodology meant a regular generation and mobilisation of potent strategies and best practice. The researchers leave the reader in no doubt that Xerox in its future change efforts will favour this social learning process of knowledge management to achieve its ambitious outcomes.

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Reference

Storck, J. and Hill,P.A.(2000) Knowledge diffusion through "strategic communities" Sloan Management Review Cambridge 41:2   P.63-74