Case Study: Xerox Corporation
23-Jul-03
Xerox Corporation is one of the largest producer of printers and photocopiers in the world. It has more 90,000 employees spread in several Countries and 25,000 representatives. Holsthouse - director of Corporate Strategy at Xerox Corporation - says Xerox was set out to be as educated as possible about knowledge management (KM). The organization has spent considerable financial resources and time to codify the collective knowledge through its research, consortium work, and sponsorship of research.
The Needs
During a study on its representative’s behaviour, Xerox noticed that most of the causes of breakdowns in the machines they sold couldn’t be found in any of the firm’s record of cases.
However representatives, thanks to their own knowledge and the knowledge they shared among each other during lunch breaks, were able to solve those problems.
Xerox therefore understood that they needed:
To make the implicit knowledge of the employees emerge and then codify it.
- To find the most suitable means to make the decodified knowledge be shared by the
whole firm.
- To allow an easy and fast access to that knowledge.
- To motivate employees so as to make them give up the idea that knowledge was an exclusive personal advantage, facilitate its sharing, and foster the creation of new
solutions and strategies to improve their business.
Solutions
The solution, called Eureka project, was the creation of:
- An electronic database, in which they stored best practices, ideas and solutions.
- An intranet for representatives to make knowledge accessible to the whole company
and facilitate the information sharing.
Implementation Method
Eureka project’s implementation can be shortly described as follows:
- A group of anthropologists of the Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center was given the task to study the behaviour of the representatives when carrying out their working
activity. The results these researchers achieved were shared with other scientists through a Web site, called Docushare.
- The 25,000 representatives were given a portable computer to connect to the intranet from anywhere in the world.
- To motivate people, business managers decided, based on a proposal of the representatives, not to give recognition in economic but in personal prestige terms.
Ideas or the experience of a representative, once become a business patrimony had to have its inventor or experimenter’s name. A selective committee (composed by
representatives designated by vote) was appointed to select best proposals and ideas.
Key Factors
The ability to recognise the need for a knowledge management approach to solve their problems and the adopted incentive system can be considered as the key success factors.
The validity of a KM project is also strictly linked to the economic resources that it succeeds in recovering and saving up. In that perspective, the project Eureka made the Xerox Corporation save about the 5-10% on the job developed from the representatives and about 10 million dollars on the
cost of pieces or replaced machines.
Source: Powers J. V. “Xerox Create a Knowledge-Sharing Culture Through Grassroots Efforts"
Details
- Author:
- Pia Nebbia
- Publisher:
- KnowledgeBoard
- Date:
- 23-Jul-03
- Categories:
- Implementation
- Sections:
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Member comments (5)
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thanks
Jolly interesting article of Xerox showing that in some senses their language is quite peculiar and this case had quite a lot of PR tinge to it
However, what lit up my eyes was the menu of practices that KM can offer and the need to make sure that people in one organisation agree which of tehse KM is to them. Without this simple attention, people can spend their whole time talking across each other's interpretations of what KM is and how it does.
The Source
I too was tempted like Chris to follow-up the source. After some cyber-hunting, I realised that the author of the article is in fact "Vicki J. Powers" and that that article was published in 1998 by the American Productivity & Quality Center.
The reference to the article is avaiable at the APQC website here, whereas I found a downloadable copy of the article at http://www.askmecorp.com/pdf/Xerox.pdf
I hope this helps all who want to see the article in full.
Cheers,
Sami
Perhaps good but not enough
It could become the beginning of a beautifull story. It is the first step, taking information from the environment. I hope the adaptation possibility of your database has been correctly done. If it is not the case, forget it. If it has been done as it should,what have you planned for the next steps ?
But let's congratulate the people for the investment.
sources
I would be interested in knowing who contributed this (sorry can't see)
I would also be interested to know how one follows up the reference: Source: Powers J. V. “Xerox Create a Knowledge-Sharing Culture Through Grassroots Efforts"
I would assume there are some other related references potentially even more central to KM and understanding community dynamics. For example, many people at knowledgeboard might gain from reading how the dynamics of community understanding truly flows as per John Seely Brown's The Social Life of Organisation. John having been the central KM/learning person at Palo Alto through all the time period the case refers to as far as I can see).
There are also extreme ironies in this case because however sincerely some communal efforts were practised in Xerox at the grassroots, it is one of those organisations that features high on anyone transparency examiner's list of comanies where governance has compounded depresing errors of judgement. I recall advising some pensioner investors to take their money out before the stock slumped not because the company couldn't have been great at the core of its grassroots communal relationships but it had shown a continous pattern of red lights regarding trust and conflicts at other systemic levels.
If interested, ask for our sample chapter on mapping trust-flow through transparency governance.
Good Technology was sold
When I was leaving Xerox (about a year ago), I know the "Eureka" technology was in the process of being sold to another company to market. It is a good technology and hopefully in the hands of another organization will prove to be successful for others.
Mary