Charles Seeley This is Me

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1. 1. www.dynamicspeakers.com

   www.dynamicspeakers.com/speake - [Cached]

   Published on: 2/21/2008   Last Visited: 3/20/2008

   - Intel, Chuck Seeley

2. 2. destinationCRM - Knowledge Management

   www.destinationcrm.com/km/dcrm - [Cached]

   Published on: 8/1/2001   Last Visited: 8/1/2001

   While serving as corporate director of KM at a large healthcare and pharmaceutical company , Charles Seeley , now knowledge manager for Intel Corp.'s technology manufacturing group in Chandler , Ariz. , proposed a meeting among international personnel from several countries. The company had a formal process for transferring products from the R&D stage to manufacturing , and theoretically that process was used uniformly by multiple worldwide teams and divisions. Most people in these teams and divisions had never met in person to share knowledge. Some of the transfers were successful , done within or under budget , and completed faster than expected , Seeley recalls. But others took an enormously long time to complete and cost a lot more..
   
   To understand the disparity , he decided to bring together members from all relevant teams.
   ...
   Seeley had to overcome moderate resistance to such a gathering. Management initially believed that knowledge exchange could be conducted solely through digital means. He persuaded his executive sponsor that to effectively apply KM to the transfer process would require forming a community of practice around the process and holding a face-to-face meeting to sow the seeds for community formation. The selling point was that people were much more likely to share their knowledge if they knew the people they were sharing with.
   
   Finally he got approval for a one-day , on-site gathering , with a social event the night before , of key people who really worked that process , whether as part of a team or as designers of the process.. About 60 people attended the meeting in New Jersey , some of them from as far away as Puerto Rico , France or Germany. Despite the fact that it was scheduled during the week before Christmas , Seeley recalls , We were oversubscribed. Many people called and said they had to be there because it was important to their jobs..
   
   Attendees' home organizations paid their travel expenses , justifying the cost on a dual basis : product transfers required significant amounts of time and money , and other attempts at improvement had not succeeded. Afterward , management agreed that the in-person meeting had led to across-the-board improvements in time and money spent and in morale.
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   The participants worked together for a joint solution rather than working separately , coming up with different solutions and spending twice as much time to do so , says Seeley.
   
   Beyond virtual Getting equal results remotely would have been impossible , Seeley asserts. If we ever hoped to improve our process across multiple divisions , organizations , departments and geographies , we had to set the stage. And the only way to set that stage is to bring people together , start building relationships , set a common foundation through people interacting directly and then move forward from there. People come away from such experiences with more openness and a recognition of how the issues are the same across different departments. E-mailing , teleconferencing or another kind of virtual collaborative space can't achieve that..
   
   Another part of the problem of remote collaboration , according to Seeley , is that those who only participate virtually don't feel a sense of ownership about solutions because they aren't really able to shape them. You might ask remote participants , for example , 'Do you like the look of this screen? , ' but that's not true engagement , says Seeley. There's difficulty in getting immediate consensus when you haven't established a foundation of commonality , that base of having already worked together in person..
   
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   The key is balance , advises Seeley. The organization , team or community needs to realize the points at which a face-to-face is mandatory..
   
   Such a decision requires managers to differentiate between types of knowledge and exchange media and to pair them appropriately.

3. 3. Line56.com: The Human Side

   www.line56.com/articles/defaul - [Cached]

   Published on: 3/29/2002   Last Visited: 4/4/2002

   "All too often knowledge management is treated as just putting in a system, as if the technology will solve all the problems," says Chuck Seeley, knowledge strategist at Intel Corp. in Chandler, Ariz. "The IT group just rolls out the technology and declares victory, and nobody uses it and nothing changes. So then you've wasted all your money."
   
   Too many managers still seem to expect that once the hardware and software components of the strategy are in place, people will start contributing information into the system and turning to it for knowledge. In reality, KM consultants say, human issues, from appropriate staffing to company culture, are crucial to success. A common adage holds that technology itself represents only about 20 percent of the cost of a knowledge management deployment, the rest being "people" costs. There's an increasing consensus among consultants and analysts, however, that while some costs, such as staffing and training, are an integral part of the project, others, most notably the difficulties in getting management and user support, can be greatly reduced by proper planning and appropriate focus.
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   "They need to get engaged, they need to see that their voice is being heard in terms of the capabilities and the user interface; they need to be involved in communicating that, and developing the plans for communicating and training for their colleagues, so that this is no longer something being imposed on them, but they're part of the solution," says Seeley of Intel.
   
   Seeley recommends beginning each deployment by analyzing who the stakeholders are and then identifying representative "thought leaders" in each group by name in order to involve them in the planning stages. As part of that analysis, he says, determine who needs to know what when, and what types of communication are most effective. Use the analysis as the foundation for the deployment's communications, training and rollout strategies.
   
   A growing consensus suggests, for example, that when it comes to getting people to use the tools, extensive training at the deployment stage is a poor substitute for involving users in the design of the tool in the first place.
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   Seeley cites a project he once worked on at a large pharmaceutical company. Medical liaisons -- professionals within the company who facilitate collaboration with outside experts such as physicians and researchers -- needed rapid access to pertinent documents and data including meeting notes, research papers and related company projects. Knowing that such a tool was needed, the information technology department went off and designed one, presenting the prototype to the intended users with great fanfare.
   
   Unfortunately, the research professionals took such exception to the design and to the fact that they were not involved in that design (an issue the IT department failed to consider) that they pronounced the product unusable. It took several additional months of discussion and redesign to create a satisfactory version. The second time around, however, key representatives of the user community were involved in all aspects of the project, including the development of communications and training plans and materials.