Ideas.com

No One Is as Smart as Everyone

There are times when Context Integration sounds like a one-person company. The same name keeps popping up in conversation. "We couldn't possibly meet our dead- lines without Ian," says one Context staffer. "If I don't know how to solve a problem, I just ask Ian," says another. "Once we show our clients what Ian can do, they're sold," says yet another. After a while, this Ian starts to sound like everybody's favorite colleague -- indeed, like an absolute genius.

In fact, Ian is IAN, the company's Intellectual Assets Network. A Web-based knowledge system that Context built from scratch in 1997, IAN was the brainchild of Bruce Strong and Stan Ward, 33, the company's chief methodologist. "We wanted to be better than our individual selves," says Strong. If individual consultants could tap into what other people in the organization knew, they could work smarter and more productively. They could help one another on technically challenging projects, and, instead of solving the same problems over and over again, they could free themselves to attack new ones. So Strong and Ward developed IAN, which functions as a kind of group brain.

Context, founded in 1992, with offices stretching from the East Coast to the West Coast, had long seen collaboration as a challenge. Lotus Notes had been helpful at times, but it never became the indispensable "go-to place" that Ward envisioned. So he and Strong decided to take matters into their own hands. But first they embarked on a "world tour," visiting every Context office to find out exactly what the company's consultants wanted in a knowledge-sharing system. Everywhere they went, they got the same feedback. They heard, "I have to be able to use it anytime I want to" -- so the two made sure that IAN was available on the Web, as well as on every laptop hard drive. They heard, "It has to be fast and convenient" -- so they created a search engine tailored to Context's homegrown vocabulary. They heard, "The content has to be accurate, up-to-date, and clean" -- so they hired someone to serve full-time as a moderator for IAN.

That someone is Mary Durham. A cheerful and energetic midwesterner, and one of many Sybase alumni who work at Context, she is an exacting knowledge manager who works in the company's Boston office. Durham, 47, says the real power of IAN lies in its simplicity. She compares the system to her favorite kitchen appliance -- a mixer -- because of its all-around utility and its absolute ease of use. When a project team begins a new assignment, for example, IAN walks members through the development process, offering sample templates, sample code to borrow or modify, and detailed descriptions of each step. "This seamless interconnection gives team members the feeling that someone has thought of everything -- on their behalf," says Durham. "They don't have to hunt for what they need."

At Context, it has become virtually impossible not to use IAN. "It's part of the ether," says Strong, who works in the San Francisco office. The IAN home page resembles a solar system, with subject areas -- "Project Artifacts," "Knowledgebase," "Discussions" -- serving as planets. In "Partners," consultants draw on a cross-referenced listing of each business partner's in-house experts. In "Colleagues," project leaders learn about new team members: their professional specialties, their technology interests -- even what they look like (most entries include a photo).

Yet IAN's real value lies not just in the ideas and information that the system stores, but in how that material affects work in the field. During another assignment, this one for the Bermuda Commodities Exchange, Abdou Touray was trying to fix an Internet trading system when the local phone lines went down. Touray was cut off from his colleagues and from the rest of the world. But he still had IAN -- in the form of an updated copy on his hard drive. In just five minutes, he found what he needed to fix the client's system: a rather complex algorithm that might have taken him a week to write. Fortunately, another consultant at Context had encountered the same problem a couple of years earlier. That consultant was no longer with the company, but his expertise was. "It's an eerie feeling when you see knowledge captured like that, especially when you're isolated on a job," says Touray. "It's almost as if you're being haunted, as if someone is reaching out from the past to help you solve your problem."

Still, group intelligence is about more than solving specific problems. The real power of sharing knowledge, says Stan Ward, comes when an entire group is able to build on an idea -- to follow a thread of innovation wherever it leads. Ideas are unpredictable, fleeting, and hard to recapture once they're lost. That's why Ward, for all his love of technology, still carries a well-worn, brown leather notebook, in which he jots down whatever comes to mind. "If I leave my notebook somewhere, I'll ask myself, 'Where did I leave my brain?' " says Ward, who has saved nine years' worth of notebooks.