July 2003

Counter Culture

By Tom Kaneshige
Two years ago, corporate culture expert and consultant Rajat Paharia faced "a sea of cubicles" at one of Honeywell International's offices. The place was faceless and gray and vast, with the muted crackling of a hundred hands typing away. "There was nowhere for people to get together," says Paharia. "There was no sharing space." However, sharing space, at least in the virtual sense, was precisely what Honeywell wanted to create with the help of Paharia and its own Digitization Group. The $24 billion technology and manufacturing leader, which has offices and facilities in 90 countries, was in the midst of building a powerful knowledge network within its prized employee portal, MyHoneywell. The idea was that this knowledge network would allow people to share intimate business knowledge with each other, and, in the process, would allow Honeywell to maximize the largely untapped resource of employee knowledge.

Of course, a knowledge network means convincing employees to open up. Given Honeywell's closed culture, opening these knowledge floodgates would prove to be difficult. Millions of dollars in portal technology investments and, critically, the future of MyHoneywell hung in the balance. What if employees turned away? Or turned off completely? "This was our biggest issue," says Gary Bird, corporate vice president of Honeywell's Digitization Group. "We've got space-aged technology out there, but the human factor is still the Achilles heel." The answer was to build a knowledge network that focused on encouraging employees to grow their personal networks, not just make information available. That meant changing the Honeywell culture so that institutional sharing would no longer be feared but rather embraced by the company's massive multinational workforce.

The Light of Knowledge
The knowledge network represents the latest evolution of the nearly three-year-old MyHoneywell employee portal. The premise of the knowledge network is that roughly 70 percent of an employee's business knowledge isn't documented. Companies can financially benefit from tapping this information and sharing it throughout the organization, typically via the portal. It's no surprise then that in a Meta Group survey from last year, 32 percent of respondents found knowledge management and search as the most important feature of the portal.

However, knowledge networks aren't for everyone. For one thing, these are big-ticketed, large-scale IT items. Following Metcalf's Law, the value of a knowledge network increases exponentially with the number of contributors, which makes it best for large companies like Honeywell. AskMe, a knowledge network software vendor whose software is running within MyHoneywell, recommends that a company have a minimum of 100 workers in geographically dispersed locations. Meta Group cites pharmaceuticals, insurance, and financial services--industries trading information--as hotbeds for knowledge networks.

Within knowledge networks, training has emerged as the most common collaborative capability, followed by e-surveys and discussion groups, according to findings from the Meta Group survey. Cross-training is big on Honeywell's knowledge network, too. For instance, Sheri Olinyk, an expert in advanced statistical techniques at Honeywell, answers up to six questions daily over the network, usually from trainees wanting to know about highly technical quality function deployments. In turn, Olinyk pings the network for advice on how to conduct complex financial analysis on certain projects. "I'm on it all the time, looking for new ways to do things," she says.

A knowledge network that cuts across divisions can lead to better customer service. If a customer service representative needs information about a unique product, "I guarantee that information exists somewhere in the company," says Bird. "With the knowledge network, you'll be able to connect to the actual person who might have designed or installed it."

Olinyk and others like her represent the cutting-edge at MyHoneywell--knowledge workers exchanging information online. But getting to this advanced stage of employee portal development hasn't been easy. Honeywell has been forced to overcome cultural hurdles at every turn, each potentially toppling the credibility of the entire portal. "The main reason for employee portal failure is that there isn't buy in," warns Craig Roth, vice president of technology research services at Meta Group, adding, "And that's a cultural issue."

A Tribal Culture
Honeywell's current cultural dynamics can be traced back to its acquisition of AlliedSignal in late 1999. A year and a half later, MyHoneywell was launched as a means to consolidate 400 internal websites, as well as standardize on a Sun Microsystems-Tibco platform. MyHoneywell served up internal content, such as human resources information and corporate edicts, and external content from Yahoo!.

Certain horizontal applications could also be accessed via MyHoneywell. For example, employees were encouraged to book flights online, saving the company $30 with every transaction. Electronic pay stubs saved more than 850,000 pieces of paper. All tallied, Honeywell claims its employee portal showed a return on investment of more than $9 million in 2001. (Honeywell declined to comment on the cost of its employee portal infrastructure; Meta Group estimates a portal reaching 80,000 employees costs anywhere from $1.25 million to $2.5 million, which includes application integration and consulting services.)

With these impressive results, Honeywell sought to do more with MyHoneywell. And in early 2002, executives decided to add a knowledge network. They envisioned a mini-engine inside of MyHoneywell that would lead employees to a searchable directory of experts throughout the company and the ability to ask questions and receive answers quickly. The task of building this knowledge network was handed, in part, to Bird's Digitization Group.

Bird knew the key to success would be getting employees to participate. He brought in Ideo, a consultancy that specializes in merging technology with culture and is best known for developing the original computer mouse, to advise on the best course for developing the knowledge network. "It was my idea to hire the anthropologists," Bird says, adding, "I had to push it hard because our technologists weren't convinced." The findings though, were startling. More than two years after the AlliedSignal acquisition, Ideo's Paharia could still see the trappings of a divided culture.

Acquisitions tend to breed fear and competition among employees, many of whom worry about becoming casualties of redundancy. Even worse, Honeywell was going through the usual rounds of layoffs in a troubled economy. Employee headcount has dropped from more than 120,000 a couple of years ago to 108,000 today. As a result, employees kept largely to themselves. "The thinking goes that my value is what's in my head," says Paharia. "If I share it, maybe I won't be as valuable."

That's not to say people didn't want to help others; they just helped those they trusted. Consequently, an employee's business network was often small, geographically isolated, and cultivated through personal relationships. "It was all informal and ad hoc, and that's how you learned your way around the place," says Paharia. "There were all these islands of communication. The phrase that kept coming up in our minds was 'tribal knowledge'."

Honeywell's tribal culture showed that employees were sharing information without being rewarded by management. Perhaps Olinyk, a nine-year-veteran, sums this up best. "Our business culture supports information sharing as simply the right thing to do," she says. "We get a certain amount of pride from being recognized by our peers as being an expert in certain areas... I don't live and die every day by management recognizing what I do."

Portal Reflections
An employee portal, particularly a knowledge network, should reflect the best of an existing culture, says Meta Group's Roth. Cultural problems should be addressed at the grassroots level before automating them. For instance, if employees are unwilling to share intellectual property because ownership of ideas isn't well defined, then management must address this as an institutional issue. Simply put, it's too much to ask employees to embrace a foreign technology, in this case a knowledge network, along with promises that existing knowledge-sharing concerns will be met. "Using the portal as a change agent can be tricky," Roth says. "A cultural problem may suddenly wind up costing a few million dollars."

Honeywell wanted its employee portal and knowledge network to reflect the advantages of tribal sharing. This meant tweaking the software. Honeywell made sure MyHoneywell wasn't all about business, adding a big dose of lifestyle resources to the general employee portal and personal networking capabilities to the knowledge network. Today, folks like Olinyk can find health tips and personal finance advice on MyHoneywell, as well as, say, employees who work with disabled children on the knowledge network. The end goal is to increase an employee's tribal network. "I've been on the knowledge network for about a year and have met, easily, a hundred new people," Olinyk says.

Other cultural reflections in the portal are more specific. Honeywell, which chose AskMe software for the framework of its knowledge network, decided to turn off AskMe's star-system features. The star system allows network participants to rate other people's contributions, using bright stars that everyone can see, including managers. Ideo's Paharia says the star system wouldn't have jived well with Honeywell's tribal culture. If Honeywell employees felt their professional evaluations might be influenced by contributions on the knowledge network, they likely wouldn't participate. "At Honeywell, there was already this fear of posting stuff to the network," Paharia says. "If you already have the fear, you're adding to it with the rating system."

However, that doesn't mean the public rating system is an inherently bad idea. AskMe's Dan Wright, vice president of field operations, is quick to point out that the star system has worked well at other companies. "One of our customers told us their research and development group goes to the knowledge network every day to check on their ratings," he says. "It's become a status symbol and has driven participation... It all depends on the culture."

Honeywell's Home Stretch
By weighing culture when building out MyHoneywell and the knowledge network, Honeywell has convinced many employees to open up and share their business tips. But there's still work ahead. For starters, more employees need access to these tools. Today, more than 30 percent of Honeywell's 108,000 employees don't have access to the basic employee portal, and only 1500 employees, mostly within Honeywell's cross-functional Six Sigma and Digitization groups, are on the knowledge network.

However, Honeywell is in the process of rolling out general access to MyHoneywell across its borders, from China to Europe, the ivory tower to the factory floor. Plans to roll out the knowledge network to key engineering and aerospace customer service divisions are also in the works. Says Karen Suchenski, communications director at Honeywell: "It would not be unreasonable to expect Honeywell's knowledge network to reach 20,000 to 30,000 users. We'll continue to scale this tool where it makes good business sense."

But for every expansion effort, there's a cultural hurdle to overcome. Industry watchers point to the difficulties in knowledge sharing in communist China. Payroll applications must be tuned to local tax laws. Different geographical areas have different ideas about electronic distribution and privacy. Meanwhile, a knowledge network poses unique concerns. Meta Group's Roth relates a hypothetical case where a salesperson at a public company, answering a question on the network, may accidentally reveal information about a big client to someone outside of sales, resulting in a confidentiality breach. "There are all sorts of risks," Roth says.

Bird though, believes the opportunities make it all worthwhile. Cross-divisional, cross-geographical knowledge sharing has some real returns, he says. Besides, an employee portal is simply a channel for bringing Honeywell people, information, and applications together. "Everyone needs to feel they are a part of Honeywell," Bird says. "It's about how you want your company's culture to emerge."