Ravi Kalluri's Weblog

Best Practices Transfer ...

Unlike Wave I, the Wave II initiative aimed at revamping the entire sales force managaement process. This encroached upon the autonomy of the CBUs. Team C did not do a good job of justifying with hard data the benefits to the salespeople of sacrificing their creativity and empowerment. Wave I had not gone this far and so such questions never got raised. There were no benchmark CBUs that could prove the real life success of Wave II recommendations. It is common knowledge that complicated things do not get embraced easily because the transition process is so painful. I feel the failure of Wave II was that it tried to achieve too much change too quickly without understanding the complexities of implemenetation involved. Any best practice transfer must take into account the culture of the receiving organization. Team C was not sure what exactly made Wave I successful so modifying its scope was a wrong approach. Wave II was not a copy of Wave I but a process innovation which would require pilot implementations before any rollouts can be possible.

Managing IBM Research in the Internet Age ...

The network centric model of computing will usher in an era of intense collaboration. No single company, not even a goliath like IBM, can hope to capture the entire Internet pie. IBM will now have to open its eyes to potential channel partnerships with the likes of Netscape & Microsoft to access the Internet consumers. At the same time, it must make sure as before to own the IP rights on it's research results since companies are increasingly patenting and commercializing the discoveries of others and doing little research of their own. IBM research division must intensify its collaboration with the IBM business divisions and also top Universities to come up with a new paradigm for research and technology transfer in services and the Internet. IBM must define the task as creating value for the end customer through the Internet. It must treat its Internet research staff as an asset and not as a cost center. This knowledge could become IBM's insurance policy against an uncertain market.

Knowledge Worker Productivity ...

The greatest asset of a 21st century company are its knowledge workers and their productivity. But making knowledge workers more productive is going to be a major challenge. Among these knowledge workers, educating the technologists is crucial for developed countries to maintain their competitive advantage. This challenge has somewhat been addressed in the US with its nationwide system of community colleges. I do have a concern with the definition of quality. If each knowledge worker himself defines the quality of his work, how does one define a quality benchmark across the board say for a particular trade like a group of neurosurgeons or research scientists working on the same problem. In addition, the productivity of the knowledge worker will in most cases require the work itself to be restructured. What will be the costs of this restructuring?

Brief info about me

I am a part-time student at Kellogg. I have over 5 years of experience working as an IT Project Manager at Lucent, Verizon and Motorola. I am curious to learn about Knowledge Management and how it can be leveraged in a fast-paced hi-tech corporate environment.