If there was ever a textbook model for a worst-case knowledge management scenario, it would have to be the ¿ber-bureau featured in Franz Kafka’s novels. Drawn from his experience working at a workers’ compensation agency, Kafka’s fictional bureaucracy was an institutional nightmare of incomprehensible information, lost files and maddening dead ends. While Kafka toiled on his 1914 novel, The Trial, lawmakers a continent away in Toronto were creating what is now known as the Workers Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB), a government-owned, employer-funded workers’ comp agency. As recently as a decade ago, calling the WSIB "Kafkaesque" would have been an apt reference.

The WSIB administers the province’s workplace insurance and provides disability benefits to injured workers, serving more than half of Ontario’s 6.2 million workers employed by approximately 182,000 businesses. Its employees use or exchange information from many sources, including employers, workers, health-care providers, occupational health and safety associations and WSIB coworkers. Unfortunately, finding even the most basic information meant sorting through a hodgepodge of octogenarian paper files, byzantine computer systems and voice-mail mazes.

Take, for example, a simple question from one of the companies that underwrites for the WSIB. "Let’s say an employer called in and said, ’I didn’t pay my dues last month. How much do I owe?’" says WSIB Knowledge Manager Ash Sooknanan. "You’d have to go and look at 28 different screens and seven or eight different applications. You’d have to log in and out of each system, print out or copy the information you needed, put it into a spreadsheet, tally it up and respond. In many cases it took days." But in 1997, the WSIB rolled out a knowledge management (KM) system that efficiently gathers, stores and processes the reams of information that flow through the agency and lets the WSIB’s 5,000 employees easily draw on this stored cache of knowledge. With its new KM program, the board hopes to close the book on any future Kafkaesque allusions.

Time Savers

For a culture so thoroughly entrenched in bureaucracy, it’s surprising that the WSIB’s KM initiative began as a grassroots effort by a handful of IS employees. Its aim: to compress the time it took to deliver projects. "[At the time] it was a very practical idea—just get the darned things delivered faster," says Valerie Adamo, CIO and vice president of IS.