"What became very obvious to us was that if you could understand why a decision was made, you wouldn’t have to continually revisit your choices," Adamo says.

TeamWorX paid off for IS. The WSIB saved approximately $1.5 million in one year by cutting the time spent on communication, according to a 1997 internal survey comparing the percentage of employees’ time spent on communication activities before and after TeamWorX was implemented.

Building TeamWorX was easier, however, than getting IS employees to share knowledge, ask questions and reuse intellectual capital. "Somehow we had to understand that asking for help did not make us stupid and didn’t make us ineffectual. In fact, asking the question made us extremely effective because it meant that we could stop making things from scratch all the time," says Adamo.

The new KM tools also challenged the general belief in the IS department that the person who can solve the problem is a hero, she says. "We had to change the model so that the guy who delivered fastest was the star," she says. "And the only way to be the fastest was to reuse things."

IS management reinforced the new cultural assumptions by rewarding those employees who used the new tools to quickly produce weekly deliverables that could be demoed for customers, created harvestables or enhanced the reusable objects.

Spreading the Word

TeamWorX turned out to be contagious. When other departments, such as HR or billing and collections, worked with IS team members on projects, they got a glimpse of TeamWorX and the knowledge bases. Those departments soon began clamoring for the tools, Adamo says. "As [internal customers] started to leave the project environment and go back to their regular workstations and business environments, lo and behold, they found uses for both TeamWorX and the knowledge bases. They basically staged a little revolt to be able to take it with them." As the tools grew in popularity, senior management came to understand their value directly from the staff. "At that point, we took it right across the corporation," Adamo says.

As the tools spread, the system evolved into a companywide intranet-based tool called the intellectual capital knowledgebase. The three-tier client/server application sits on a Lotus/Domino platform using Windows NT workstations connected to both OS/2 and mainframe servers. The intranet provides a user interface that accesses data from Notes databases and also provides e-mail for workstations.

The Notes databases and forums include:

TeamWorX: information for teams and work groups, including correspondence, meeting minutes, tasks, status reports and forums for team communication and collaboration.