kanban to kanbrain (forbes asap, 1994)

7/28/2019 Kanban to Kanbrain (Forbes ASAP, 1994)

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85une 6, 1994

Is YOUR REENGlNEEIUNG PROjECf bogging down? Don't be surprised. Even JamesChampy and Michael Hammer, the authors of last year's bestseller Reengineeri ngt he Co rp o ra ti on, confess that three-quarters of corporate reengineering efforts failto be carried out adequately, or even at all.An outwom academic stereotype of learning could be the bottleneck. "The

false correlation of learning with training or education is one of the most commonand costly errors in corporate management today," says Xerox Corp. vice-presidentJohn Seely Brown, who directs the company's famous Palo Alto Research Center.Robert Clegg acquired this insight the hard way. Clegg is senior vice-presidentfor customer account services at The Charles Schwab Corp. inSan Francisco.Like many executives, he found that implementing fundamental change is a lotharder than charting it. After two years of leading the business process redesignprogram at Schwab, Clegg now says that he has discovered the roadblock: "the dif-ficulty of getting people to see how learning really works."At Schwab a computer tool called SP ARK S, introduced to Clegg by Coopers &

Just as the slashing of inventories by kanbantransformed the making and marketing ofgoods, the new "kanbtainn systems promisean upheaval in how business is organized andconducted. One result: Corporate classroomsand training departments, as well as campusrecruiting, are headed for obsolescence.

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By LEWIS J. PERELMAN


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will replace the warehousing ofknowledge in classrooms and libraries,and of degreed experts in corpora tedepartments. With what? Just-in-timeintelligence and on-demand hyperlearning.

At the heart of kanbrain development is the rapid spread of performance support systems. The conceptof performance support tools wasbroached in the rnid-1980s by RichardHom, president of Cincinnati-basedCornware, today's leader in knowledgesupport systems, in collaboration withMarc Rosenberg at AT&T. Rosenbergrecalls brainstorming with Hom aboutcomputer-based training. Over thecourse of a year the pair came to therealization that something very different was needed.

"We concluded that workers needed

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ApPL.E,INTEL.,ANDERSENDIVE INThere arc plenty of signs that it's happening. In the spring of 1993 LucyCarter, a training director at AppleComputer, went to Ian Diery, vieepresident in charge of Apple's personalcomputer division, to talk about replacing "19th-century training" with amodern performance support system."Our people should be learning withthe same 21st-century technologywe're selling to our customers," shesuggested. Management agreed.In August Carter became director ofthe new worldwide performance systems group that she had put together.By the beginning of 1994 the group hadtran sform ed a heap of existing trainingresources into the Apple Reference Performance Learning Experience & Presentation Library, or ARPLE("ar-pull").Originally based heavily on CD-ROMs,ARPLE gradually migrated toclient/server Ethernet networks usingApple's workgroup server technology.

software. Another product, called thePerformance Management Assistant,gives AT&T workers and supervisors avariety of on-line aids both to improvecurrent job performance and to planfurther career development. On theirpersonal computers AT&T employeeshave a series of icons that, whenclicked, point them to specific reference documents or advise them if theyare having job difficulties."If there is a problem with a staffmember who is, say, disrupting morale,a manager can use the PerformanceManagement Assistant to help figureout what to do," Rosenberg explains.In this case the manager would answera series of specific questions, and theprogram would list the options available to him.Relatively simple stuff. Indeed, thelimitations of PCs and bandwidth in

the mid-1980s made more dynamicperformance support systems easier toconceptualize than to build. That'schanged. Today, pulling employees outof work for training has proven to beextremely expensive, Rosenberg says."The technology now is ready for perforrnance support to take off exponentially."

There may be no major company jumping into kanbrain more broadly and rapidly than $20 billionHewlett Packard Co. "We're constantly pushing toblur the lines between learning and doing the job,"says Susan Burnett, manager of worldwide salesforce development.Just a few years ago nearly 100 percent of HP sales training was done inclassrooms, Burnett notes. Internal research showed that the average sales rep

was spending 12 to 15 days a year-up to three full business weeks-in aclassroom, at enormous cost. Moreover, about three-fourths of the time repsdid spend working with customers was consumed by transferring catalogs andreports from the central office.On top of allthat HP's product life cycles shrank in the last couple of yearsfrom around 18 months to as little as six months. At the same time technical fea

tures, specs and applications became more complex, and administrative supportwas being cut to pare overhead just when the sales force was deluged with agrowing mass of information.The company's top sales management could seethat the whole system was headed for a breakdown. HP wanted its salespeopleto spend most of their time actually selling, not sitting i n classrooms or passingout brochures.Before 1990, whenever HP introduced a new product, it would bring its 950sales reps to a conference center for a day or two of training,at a cost of about$5 million.The HewlettPackard InteractiveNetwork(HPIN)hat TomWilkins,R&Dmanager, media technologies, helped create has cut the cost of new-productseminars to onlyabout $80,000--a reductionof more than 98 percent. Thenetworkhas proven so cost-effective that it is even becoming a profitcenter: HP sells theservice to other organizations.HPIN's tutored video instruction is classroomlike in format. Instructors andfacilitators in specially designed originating studios like the one in Santa Clara,Calif., beam out their telecourses to conference rooms in HP offices and facto

ries around the world. Instructors get real-time feedback both frommicrophonesat each student's desk and from networked HP 100 LXpocket computers usedby each participant to raise an electronic "hand" or to respond to an instructor'squestions. The instructor, whose own workstation displays an electronic seatingchart showing each on-line site, can poll the students and instantly display theresults in computer-generated tables or charts.The superficial similarityto classroom trainingmasks an ongoing transtormation of leaming processes. Livecourses, in Wilkins'view, should be targeted atconveying highly volatile information that is changing too quicklyto be wortharchivingon something likea multimediainstructional disk. Networkactivities aremore inthe form of meetings and conferences than classes. "The network willmove more toward an on-demand, just-in-time system," says Wilkins,"as weadd video servers 50 that programs can be stored and retrieved at each user'sconvenience." He anticipates that the HPINwill gradually be absorbed intogroupware networks and will evolve to provide on-demand training. This way,already filmed training sessions can be stored and accessed through a variety ofdifferent networks as their bandwidth grows to include two-way video conferencing as a standard feature.

HEWLETTPACKARD CUTSCOSTS FROM$5M TO $80K

Once a kit of tools was created tohelp workers on the job, the next logical step was to catalog the tools andmake them available them on a computer network. Comware worked withAT&T to create the first knowledgesupport system, called a training testconsultant, aimed at corporate trainers.It was so successful that a three-dayclass was canceled and replaced with

software tools to get knowledge andskill just in time, where and when theyare doing their jobs," says Rosenberg,who currently has the bellwether titleof district manager, learning strategy. Itseemed inefficient, he says, "to alwayspull workers out of their jobs to tellthem how to do their jobs better. W 11 Ycan't they learn while they're on the

job?"

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MINING YOUR DATA FOR PATTERNSIn some organizations kanbrain hasbeen used to enhance teleconferencingefforts originally set up to reduce traveldemands. National Technological University, Fort Collins, Colo., deliversuniversity engineering courses by satellite to dozens of U.S. companiesnationwide. Clients include Exxon,General Electric, Polaroid and IBM.One of the most advanced and effective private teleleaming networks isrun by Hewlett Packard [see sidebar onfacing page).

Many leaders in the field think that

Andersen's New York office. "It letsme find out who has skills out therethat I don't have, so I can quickly puttogether an on-line team to help mesolve the client's problem."

The Knowledge Xchange also keepsemployees up to date on their peers'work by indicating when new discussion topics in their area of interest havebeen posted. Durfee says he logs on tothe Xehange in the morning beforework or at night when he comes home.

Forbes ASAP

CAN'T SLOWDOWN Fastcompanies wantlearning 012 the go.

ARPL E gives more than 20,000 Appleemployees around the world on-lineand on-demand access to the company's entire base of sales, marketing andtechnical information and trainingresources. Frequent updates are delivered by CD-ROM.

Sales representatives relied heavilyon ARPLE in March when the companylaunched the PowerPC Macintosh."We put everything on line that theycuuld possibly use-research, corporatestrategies, training brochures, competitive analysis, you name it," saysCarter. "In the past we would havesent out about three videos, a pile ofliterature and four or five CDs to eachsales office."Carter says she is convinced ARPLEis a breakthrough. Internal studies suggest it saves representatives 11 hours amonth previously spent searching forinformation. "That's three or fourmore sales calls a month," she says.

Jessica Rocha, a manager in thedesign technology area at Intel Corp.,has worked on developing support systems for application engineers. Theengineers' role is to build abridge between customersfor the company's semiconductor products and theIntel designers who develop the tools that, in tum,make the chips. The jobdemands a wide array ofskills: teaching designershow to use tools correct!y,helping them understandcustomer needs and providing hot-line support towhoever needs it. To helpthe engineers cope, Rocha'sgroup collected BKMs,bestknown methods, in on-linesoftware packages. Theengineers can access theBKMs any time to getexpert knowledge justwhen it is needed.

Andersen Consulting has developedthe Knowledge Xchange, an in-houseversion of the kind of consulting helpit sells to clients. Knowledge Xchangecreates virtual "communities of practice": Lotus Notes groupware andMicrosoft OfficeSuite run on a NovellNetWare-based LAN; the LAN is connected to a proprietary client/serverbased WAN."The value of a consulting finn likeours is in its knowledge capital,"explains Charlie Paulk, chief information officer. "The idea of the Knowledge Xchange is to make all of thefirm's accumulated knowledge andskills immediately available to each-ofour consultants, and therefore to everyclient. It's a virtual place where al l our27,000 consultants can share theirknowledge and expertise inglobal communities of practice."

The Knowledge Xchange is available to each consultant on her desktopand laptop computers and affects thework she does on the front line. "It'smore than just passing along content,"says Dave Durfee, a senior manager in

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WHOS TO BLAME? MANAGEMENTA growing rift divides corporate managers, both across organizations andwithin them. The division is significantly generational: younger managersand workers who have grown up withTV, computers and videogarnes oftenhave a notably different approach tothe modern tools of work than theolder top managers of many organizations. Information Age technology issplitting the business world into twoincompatible and increasingly conflicting cultures.For at least the past two genera

tions, business management in America, and in most other industrializednations, has become increasingly acad-

they face when doing their job."When we do that, there are always

some workers, usually silent, whoopen up and have a lot to contributeabout how their department is run,"says Martel.Managers mistakenly believe that

certain workers are slow learners. Infact, the workers' learning styles aresimply different from their own andmay be superior in the workplace.Management's mandates for moreclassroom training for workers mayonly widen the riftbetween employeesand management, And faddish calls forthe company to become a "learningorganization" may only serve toinflarne managers' snobbiest impulses."The problem with academically

oriented management," Martelobserves, "is that managers think theyhave to appear to be the experts. Theycannot appear not to know something.Therefore they cannot learn. Oftenthey cannot tolerate anyone elsearound them learning either."Such misunderstandings will quash

the most technically advanced kanbrain architecture. Xerox's John SeelyBrown emphasizes that "being a socalled learning organization isn't goingto get you very far unless you also arcunlearning the knowledge and beliefsthat are simply no longer true." This isprecisely why the builders of the newperformance support cyberstructuresregard the precepts of cognitive scienceas their most useful tools.

don't understand how learners actuallylearn," says Intel's Rocha, echoing theinsight of Schwab's Clegg. Rocha isamong the growing number of managers who are trying to write into kan-brain systems the theories of cognitivescientists about how human learningworks most productively.One scientist whose work has

helped major corporations hyperchargethe speed of human learning is Laurence Martel, president of IntegrativeLearning Systems Inc., Hilton Head,S.C. He has helped Eastman Kodak,Alcan, Intel, Shell Oil and CulfsrreamAerospace tackle the key reengineeringbarrier Clegg defined: understandinghow learning works.Martel's research shows that just as

people have a variety of blood types,they also have significantly different"styles" of using sensory input-hearing, seeing, touching, moving, etc.which enable learning to occur. He saysthat in order to address these differentlearning styles, kanbrain should integrate several media to ensure thatknowledge is digestible by as manypeople as possible. A typical result:Applying Martel's integrative learningmethods, Kodak's film-processing division was able to achieve an internalClass A quality rating a year ahead ofschedule, with the highest internalranking (99.5)in the company's history.The central cause of corporateknuckleheadedness, as Martel sees it,

is not just that management fails tounderstand how learning works, butthat what management thinks itunderstands is wrong. Says Martel,"Corporations today are being hobbledby two corollary myths: that managerscause productivity and that teacherscause learning."Martel's experience indicates that

managers, who are hired for their academic rather than their workplace competencies, often have a different learning style (visual/verbal/auditory) fromthat of most front-line workers (tactile/kinesthetic). With Martel's trainingKodak employees encountered differentlearning presentations-some visualwith diagrams, others set to rap music.In one session workers passed around asmall ball and discussed what obstacles

DIFFERENT STYLES OF LEARNING"Building just-in-time learning systemsisn't going to do much good if you

stand-alone technology such as CDROM has at least as strong a role toplay in the distribution of just-in-timelearning as on-line networks do. "Youhave to keep in mind that the 'contentcurve' -the cost of capturing a unit ofknowledge in storage media such asoptical disks-is fallin.grapidly," pointsout Joe Carter, managing partner ofAndersen Consulting's new Center forStrategic Technology in Palo Alto,Calif.One of the newcr gadgets in the

kanbrain toolkit is called automateddiscovery, also known as data mining.An example is the Information Discovery System, or IDIS, sold by IntelligenceWare Inc., Los Angeles. KarnranParsaye, the company's founder, is amathematician who sold his first autodiscovery system in 1987. IBM-compatible ID IS runs on a variety of platforms,including Windows, Sybase, Paradoxand Oracle.

" A uto discovery is basically theopposite of an expert system," Parsayeexplains. "An expert system appliesrules a human programmer has writtento solve a problem. But an auto discovery system such as ID IS actually discovers explicit rules, hypotheses andknowledge that are hidden in largedatabases.rtOne ID IS component discovers cor

relations, he says, such as "big supermarkets that sell 3,000 boxes of cerealin February are 92 percent likely to sell4,000 cases of mineral water in July."A second tool displays sigrtificant patterns such as the cycle of cereal salesby month of the year and by state. Athird component picks up anomaliesthat might reveal data entry errors,defective equipment or fraud.

ID IS tools have been used by NewYork investment firm Gilman Securities to scope out subtle trends in financial markets, by Eltron Research to discover new catalysts and crystallizationprocesses, and by Southern CaliforniaSpinal Disorders Hospital, Los Angeles,to fine-tune diagnosis and treatment ofpatients.

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don't careabout tests.Wewant peopleto be able to perform work processeswell, as judgedby their peers."Marc Rosenberg,AT&T's learningstrategist, points out that using classrooms just for "dumping knowledge"makes no sense. Instead, he sees therooms as "places for teams to worktogetheron solvingproblems."This is the pattern at AndersenConsulting, where Nowakowskireports that "courseware"such as thedo-it-yourself Business PracticesCourse {BP CJ is being transferred tohundreds of CD-ROM multimedia platforms scattered throughout the firm'soffices worldwide. BP C provides 40hours of simulatedclient engagementsand meetings with upper management. Multimedia instruction savesAndersen at least $2 million a year,saysNowakowski,because it's 50 percent faster.What goes on in the increasingly

paraphernalia are headed for obsolescence. Some divisions at HewlettPackardhave eliminated90 percent ormore of classroomtraining,and othersare quickly followingsuit. Carter estimates that since last year roughly 75percent of Apple's classroom traininghas beenreplacedby just-in-time,multimedialearningplatforms."Weaim toget to zeroas soonas the technologyisready,"Cartersays."We're working to reengineer theentire learning process," says AlanNowakowski, director of training atAndersen Consulting's education center in St. Charles, ill.What does thatmean in practice? "Just-in-timelearning at what we call the 'point ofneed'-taking controlout of the handsof instructors and putting it into thehands of the learner," he says. "Wewant active, not passive,learnerswholearn in a context as close to the realwork environment as possible. We

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SHAKING OUTTHE COSTS Newkanbrain methodscut training time.

CLASSROOMSARE OUTPerhaps the most inunediate and graphic impact ofthis revolution is that corporate classrooms and theaccompanying academic

emized.Followingthe academicmodelinwhich management's own experience was rooted, management treatedknowledgeand know-howas inventoried commodities. Companies builtwhat they regarded as their expertiseby recruiting the best students withcredentialsfrom the "top" schoolsandhousing them in specialized departments.Recognizing that knowledge ispower, academized managementssequesteredcorporateknowledgeat thetop of the organizationchart and limited access to those who "need toknow." Reflecting their own experience, managers viewed learning aspreparation for working and thereforeas a separateactivityconfinedto classrooms and fomented by professionalinstructors.Respondingto this demandare the 80,000 M.B.A.s filing out ofbusiness colleges every year-20,000more than just a decadeago.At the heart of the ka nbrain rift is the drivingforce of hypermation technology:to shrink the loopthat connects learningandworking. "The more youseparate learning from thejob," says Lucy Carter ofApple, "the less effectiveand competitive you'regoing to be. At Apple wewant to get the learningasclose to the work environment as possible." Thekanbrain pioneers at Intel,Hewlett Packard, Xeroxand other corporate andmilitary organizationswilltell you the same thing.

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Kerry Lauerman provided additionalresearch and reporting to this story.

As the bandwidth of performancesupport networks like Andersen'sKnowledgeXchangeexpandsto includelive, two-way video conferencingas astandardfeature, the teams and roomsand centerswill al l go virtual, becoming places where people go to learntogether in cyberspace, without thecost of room,boardand airfare.As classrooms vanish from business, kanbrain pioneers are realizingthat recruiting on the basis of classroom achievement becomes increasingly irrelevant, even counterproductive. Allstate Insurance is one of agrowing number of employers thathave foundthat the same multimediatechnologyused for on-demand training can be used to assess job applicants' skills with far greater precisionthan can resumes or diplomas.Andersen Consulting's Canadian office isnow using job simulations to evaluaterecruits.Even though one of the mantras ofAndersenConsulting is "we hire thebest people," the firm's internalresearch revealed that the best consulting performers are not the beststudents from the best schools.Rather, says David Reed, one of thefirm's recruiting directors, "wellrounded" summarizes the set of personal characteristics he and his colleaguesare lookingfor. This includescollegeextracurricular activities suchas sports and fraternities and sororities, which show a larger commitment to life experience outside theclassroom. "We hire people with allkinds of backgrounds,"he says. "Youreally don't have to have a collegedegreeto work here."The developments at pioneeringfirmschartedhere may seemminor inthe context of the wholeeconomy,andtop managementmay not say or evenknow much about what's going onbeneath its feet. But the pressures ofcolliding and incompatible businessparadigmsarc buildingeveryday.Lastyear a half-dozen of the biggest U.S.corporations fired their CEOs. Youain't seen nothingyet. ~

An "anomaly." That's what the engineers call itwhen a communications satellite goes haywire.INTELSAT5 hadananomaly on Sept. 14, 1992. Forits antenna dishes to remain pointed at the groundstations that pump thousands of telephone, 1V andother signals in and out of the satellite, the craft's

position in space has to be scrupulously controlled. But the computers, thrustersand other control systems are imperfect, and every once in a while they get outof whack.When INTELSAT5 went awry, engineers in the control room struggled for 30

minutes to figure out the cause of the problem. But their diagnosis-a problemwith the satellite's angle-turned out to be wrong. Another 60 minutes passedbefore they found the true fault-a power outage--and fixed it. It then took another two hours to get the satellite back in operation.Soon therafter, senior software engineer Ravi Rastogi was leading a team that

was developing control applications for G2, a real-time expert system development platform sold by Gensym Corp., Cambridge, Mass., that makes extensiveuse of object-oriented graphics. To evaluate the effectiveness of the SatelliteDiagnostic System they developed with G2, Rastogi's group tested it by havinga controller team use it on a simulated rerun of the Sept. 14, 1992, anomaly.Instead of the 90 minutes required to solve the problem with the old system, theG2-based SOS found the cause of the failure in 32 seconds.Training is faster, too. "It used to take about two weeks to train engineers to

use the old control system," says Louis Ortega, INTELSAT's chief engineer forcontrol automation, "but they can pick up this new systemjust by coming in andplaying around with it for a couple of hours."

Market forces drove these innovations. Not only is about $100,000 of revenue lost for each hour a satellite is out of service, but customers such asbanks or brokers who depend on constant communications get, to put it mildly, disillusioned. (It can be worse: A control anomaly during a satellite launchcan blow a half-billion-dollar investment.)

New technology and corporate policy upped the ante. "The new INTELSAT7series roughly doubles the amount of information and number of options controllers have to deal with," Rastogi explains. "Because management decided wecan't expand the staff, we needed to improve the effectiveness of control systems, and we needed to develop the new systems quickly."The old control systems confronted engineers with six white-on-black screens

crammed with tables of text and numbers. Rastogi's replaced them with colorfulWindows-style graphical displays of telemetry data, along with on-demand, online reference information to replace paper manuals. "Most important," says Rastogi, ''the engineers needed event-driven inferencing:' jargon for quick advice onwhat's wrong and how to fix it when a problem comes up.

Rastogi estimated that developing this kind of system using conventionalgraphical software would havetaken about 20person-years of work, worth about$2million. "We paid about $700,000for the G2 software. We started the designin J anuary 1993 and had our first rehearsal in J une. We put about three personyears of work in. We probably couldn't have been ready any other way." TheSOS system is now being implemented on a UnixTCP/IP network driven by a HP735 serving 60 workstations.

LOSING$100,000AN HOUR GAVEINTELSATRELIGION

made up of three Andersen consultants, chosen for their specialties.Oneplays the role of the client; the othertwo are facilitators.Inparticular,saysNowakowski, "we want to encouragethe teams to be daring, and to makemistakes here, in a fail-safeenvironment." That's not education-that's"virtualizing"a businessprocess.

class-freeclassroomsat Andersen'sSt.Charles center are, Nowakowskisays,"goal-based scenarios." The firmbrings about 36 novice consultantstogether for several days to work onauthentic client problems in teams offour-almost exactly the same formatthat they facein their offices.The fac-ulty is

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kanban to kanbrain (forbes asap, 1994)

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