Real World Intranets, Part 4

Ericsson, Research and Development Department: A Case Study

Printer Friendly Version

How do you bring organization to a system that thrives on its own brand of disorder? Can a department intranet have a top-down hierarchical structure, when the parent company resists such instilled centralized discipline?

In previous articles in this series, we've looked at department intranets that followed an American corporate style: each was organized with a set structure in order to facilitate knowledge management and provide quick access to information. But Ericsson isn't an American company and it doesn't welcome rigid structures.

Swedish-owned, with R&D offices around the world, Ericsson draws strength from its creative professionals following their own interests. It rewards those who pursue independent goals. And, despite the organizational difficulty, the R&D intranet reflects that. It isn't really one department intranet at all, but a cluster of R&D sites all run by different offices. There's no one person in charge of the R&D sites and no umbrella site covering them all. The challenge then is to make crucial information available and accessible the company's many far-flung research engineers.

A Culture of Consensus
In Swedish companies, there must be widespread agreement before a change is put in place, says Armand Gauthier, Manager of Information Systems in Ericsson's Montreal office. He calls it "a culture of consensus." It's less directive than the US way of working; there's greater emphasis on human values and quality of life.

The result, at least for the R&D intranet, is a sprawling system where each office hosts its own sites on its own servers. While there is a system in place directing how new R&D subsites should be added and arranged, it isn't easy for the neophyte to grasp. Consultants say it takes six months, Gauthier notes, to find their way around the department intranet.

As Ericsson's offices continue to pursue new wireless concepts and technologies, engineers need to reach out to other employees working in the same areas, to share knowledge. Searching for reliable contacts can take hours, Gauthier says, because the department sites are so loosely organized.

"Too much information is like too little at some point," he adds, since either way its hard for employees to find knowledge they can use. So where does Gauthier see a solution? Simple, he doesn't. For him, the answer is to embrace that looser way of working. Rather than imposing organizational systems, he thinks its more important to nurture Ericsson's own humane and creative methods.

Order in Chaos
Still, Ericsson's research professionals need some easy way to reach out to others working on similar projects. Contributing to that goal is Anders Hemre, the Director of Enterprise Performance and Chief Knowledge Officer at Ericsson's Montreal office. Hemre has been with the company for over 30 years, and has worked in a variety of countries. He's well versed in Ericsson's corporate culture, which he calls "an institutionalized lack of discipline." That's why he's now implementing Organik, a tool built by Orbital Software of Framingham, MA, to create online communities that live within the R&D intranet. It's a system that puts people in touch with one another, while preserving an independent way of working.

Hemre investigated other products before settling on Orbital's, but none were right for what he had in mind. Many had useful tools, like search engines and knowledge management systems, but Organik seemed to excel in creating people networks. Organik looks like a standard discussion forum on the surface, but does much more. Using dynamic profiling, it builds a knowledge profile on every user, based on what information the user posts. That makes it easier for the employees to search for experts on a given topic.

Building Community
Hemre has been growing the Orbital project slowly over the past two years. In fact, the project started with different goals and different software. In September, 1999, while visiting a trade show, Hemre took notice of a different Organic tool called Dialogue, which creates an online directory of experts. He signed up to implement Dialogue on the Ericsson intranet; under an industry leader program, Ericsson would be the first large company to use Dialogue.

When representatives from Orbital visited Ericsson early in 2000, to discus the implementation, they showed Hemre a new piece of software called Organik. He immediately decided that it was better suited to Ericsson's needs and decided to run with it instead. Ericsson and Orbital started work that summer and had Organik ready by the fall.

As of this writing, Ericsson's R&D department has five online communities and two online networks. They run off a Red Hat Linux 6.2 server, on a Compaq Deskpro Pentium III. A separate database server for online discussions runs off an Oracle 8.1.5 server on a Sun Ultra 5. The hardware is "nothing sophisticated," Hemre says, while noting that he may have to switch to something more robust as the communities grow. And grow they certainly will, since these fluid, open communities seem a perfect complement to Ericsson's corporate style.

Printer Friendly Version