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Accenture has long been seen as a leader in knowledge management, having received awards for many years. Over the years though, islands of knowledge have developed throughout the organization and the delivery infrastructure has become progressively more expensive. In 2004, the global knowledge management lead has been given the mandate to lead a revitalization of knowledge management. Outlines governance challenges in the global firm, the transition to a new IT infrastructure, and the strategic challenges and opportunities facing knowledge management within Accenture.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Futurists have long anticipated the day when computers would relieve managers and professionals of the need to make certain types of decisions. But automated decision making has been slow to materialize. Argues that automated decision making is finally coming of age and the new generation of applications differs substantially from prior decision-support systems. Today's applications are easier to create and manage than earlier systems. Rather than require people to identify the problems or to initiate the analysis, companies typically embed decision-making capabilities in the normal flow of work. Those systems then sense online data, apply codified knowledge or logic, and make decisions--all with minimal amounts of human intervention. They can help businesses generate decisions that are more consistent than those made by people, and they can help managers move quickly from insight to decision to action--helping companies reduce labor costs, leverage scarce expertise, improve quality, enforce policies, and respond to customers. As automating decisions becomes more feasible, organizations need to think about which decisions people must make and which can be computerized.

Despite the much-ballyhooed increase in outsourcing, most companies are in do-it-yourself mode for the bulk of their processes, in large part because there's no way to compare outside organizations' capabilities with those of internal functions. Given the lack of comparability, it's almost surprising that anyone outsources today. But it's not surprising that cost is by far companies' primary criterion for evaluating outsourcers or that many companies are dissatisfied with their outsourcing relationships. A new world is coming, says the author, and it will lead to dramatic changes in the shape and structure of corporations. A broad set of process standards will soon make it easy to determine whether a business capability can be improved by outsourcing it. Such standards will also help businesses compare service providers and evaluate the costs vs. the benefits of outsourcing. Eventually these costs and benefits will be so visible to buyers that outsourced processes will become a commodity, and prices will drop significantly. The low costs and low risk of outsourcing will accelerate the flow of jobs offshore, force companies to reassess their strategies, and change the basis of competition. The speed with which some businesses have already adopted process standards suggests that many previously unscrutinized areas are ripe for change. In the field of technology, for instance, the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute has developed a global standard for software development processes, called the Capability Maturity Model. For companies that don't have process standards in place, it makes sense for them to create standards by working with customers, competitors, software providers, businesses that processes may be outsourced to, and objective researchers and standard-setters. Setting standards is likely to lead to the improvement of both internal and outsourced processes.

The List is HBR's annual attempt to capture ideas in the state of becoming--when they're teetering between what one person suspects and what everyone accepts. Roderick M. Kramer says it isn't bad when leaders flip-flop. Julia Kirby describes new efforts to redefine the problem of organizational performance. Joseph L. Bower praises the "Velcro organization," where managerial responsibilities can be rearranged. Jeffrey F. Rayport argues that companies must refocus innovation on the "demand side." Eric Bonabeau describes a future in which computer-generated sound can be used to transmit vast amounts of data. Roger L. Martin says highly reliable corporate systems such as CRM tend to have little validity. Kirthi Kalyanam and Monte Zweben report that marketers are learning to contact customers at just the right moment. Robert C. Merton explains how equity swaps could help developing countries avoid some of the risk of boom and bust. Thomas A. Stewart says companies need champions of the status quo. Mohanbir Sawhney suggests marketing strategies for the blogosphere. Denise Caruso shows how to deal with risks that lack owners. Thomas H. Davenport says personal information management--how well we use our PDAs and PCs--is the next productivity frontier. Leigh Buchanan explores workplace taboos. Henry W. Chesbrough argues that the time is ripe for services science to become an academic field. Kenneth Lieberthal says China may change everyone's approach to intellectual property. Jochen Wirtz and Loizos Heracleous describe customer service apps for biometrics. Mary Catherine Bateson envisions a midlife sabbatical for workers. Jeffrey Rosen explains why one privacy policy won't fit everyone. Tihamer von Ghyczy and Janis Antonovics say firms should embrace parasites. And Jeffrey Pfeffer warns business-book buyers to beware. Additionally, HBR offers a list of intriguing business titles due out in 2005.

Two hundred of today's leading management thinkers were asked to identify their gurus. The result is an illuminating list, notable for some of the less obvious names it contains.

There's an unsung hero in your organization. It's the person who's bringing in new ideas from the outside about how to manage better. This is the manager who, for instance, first uttered the phrase "Balanced Scorecard" in your hallways, or "real options," or "intellectual capital." Managerial innovation is an increasingly important source of competitive advantage--especially given the speed with which product innovations are copied--but it doesn't happen automatically. It takes a certain kind of person to welcome new management ideas and usher them into an organization. The authors recently studied 100 such people to find out how they translate new ideas into action in their organizations. "Idea practitioners," as the authors call them, begin by scouting for ideas. All of them are avid readers of management literature and enthusiastic participants in business conferences; many are friendly with business gurus. Once they've identified an idea that seems to hold promise, they tailor it to fit their organizations' specific needs. Next, they actively sell the idea--to senior executives, to the rank and file, to middle managers. And finally, they get the ball rolling by participating in small-scale experiments. But when those take off, they get out of the way and let others execute. In this article, the authors identify the characteristics of idea practitioners and offer strategies for managing them wisely.

Like all primary care physicians, Dr. Bob Goldszer must stay on top of approximately 10,000 different diseases and syndromes, 3,000 medications, 1,100 laboratory tests, and many of the 400,000 articles added each year to the biomedical literature. That's no easy task. And it is, quite literally, a matter of life and death. The Institute of Medicine's 1999 report, To Err Is Human, suggests that more than a million injuries and 90,000 deaths are attributable to medical errors annually. Something like 5% of hospital patients have adverse reactions to drugs, another study reports, and of those, 43% are serious, life threatening, or fatal. Many knowledge workers have problems similar to Dr. Goldszer's (though they're usually less life threatening). No matter what the field, many people simply can't keep up with all they need to know. In the early years of knowledge management, companies established knowledge networks and communities of practice, built knowledge repositories, and attempted to motivate people to share knowledge. But each of these activities involved a great deal of additional labor for knowledge workers. A better approach, say the authors, is to bake specialized knowledge into the jobs of highly skilled workers. Partners HealthCare has started to embed knowledge into the technology that doctors use in their jobs so that consulting it is no longer a separate activity. Now when Dr. Goldszer orders medicine or a lab test, the order-entry system automatically checks his decision against a massive clinical database as well as the patient's own medical record. Knowledge workers in other fields could likewise benefit from a just-in-time knowledge-management system tailored to deliver the right supporting information for the job at hand.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Many firms know about their customers, but few know the customers themselves or how to get new ones. Leaders in customer knowledge management go beyond transaction data, using a mix of techniques, and they aren't afraid to tackle difficult problems. The authors report results from interviews with 24 leading firms and describe seven practices that the leaders share. The companies interviewed--including Harley-Davidson, Procter & Gamble, and Wachovia Bank--have undertaken specific and successful initiatives centered around the management of customer knowledge. Within the practices, two results stand out: First, firms are beginning to rely more on data from actual interactions, such as sales and service. They are seeking creative ways to turn data from these interactions into knowledge. Second, even the most ambitious firms are keeping data from different approaches separate. They are not accepting the notion of an integrated data repository. The authors go on to present the practices of the leaders in customer knowledge management.

Data remains one of our most abundant yet underutilized resources. This article provides a holistic framework that will help companies maximize this resource. Outlines the elements necessary to transform data into knowledge and then into business results. Managers must understand that human elements--strategy, skills, culture--need to be attended to along with technology. Examines the experiences of over 20 companies that were successful in their data-to-knowledge efforts. Identifies the critical success factors that must be present in any data-to-knowledge initiative and offers advice for companies seeking to build a robust analytic capability.

Employees have an enormous amount of business information at their fingertips--more specifically, at their desktops. The floodgates are open; profitable possibilities abound. But having to handle all that information has pushed downsized staffs to the brink of an acute attention deficit disorder. To achieve corporate goals, business leaders need their employees' full attention--and that attention is in short supply. In this article, the authors analyze the components of attention management through three lenses--economic, psychobiological, and technological--and offer guidelines for keeping employees focused on crucial corporate tasks. Their lessons are drawn from the best practices employed by today's stickiest Web sites and by traditional attention industries such as advertising, film, and television. The authors say executives must manage attention knowing that it's a zero-sum game (there's only so much to go around). Managers should also consider capitalizing on the basic survival and competitive instincts we all have that help determine how much attention we pay to certain things. For instance, the threat of corporate demise--and the consequent loss of jobs and livelihoods--undoubtedly focuses workers' attention on the need to change. Likewise, internal competition among business units may give employees added incentive to pay attention to a profit or sales goal.

Drawing on a rich set of company examples, Thomas H. Davenport, a professor at the University of Texas's Graduate School of Business, provides a fresh, high-level perspective on enterprise systems that will help senior executives think rationally about their large-scale investments in this technology. Enterprise systems present a new model of corporate computing. They allow companies to replace their existing information systems, which are often incompatible with one another, with a single, integrated system. By streamlining data flows throughout an organization, these commercial software packages, offered by vendors like SAP, promise dramatic gains in a company's efficiency and bottom line. It's no wonder that businesses are rushing to jump on the ES bandwagon. But while these systems offer tremendous rewards, the risks they carry are equally great. Not only are the systems expensive and difficult to implement, they can also tie the hands of managers. Unlike computer systems of the past, which were typically developed in-house with a company's specific requirements in mind, enterprise systems are off-the-shelf solutions. They impose their own logic on a company's strategy, culture, and organization, often forcing companies to change the way they do business. Managers would do well to heed the horror stories of failed implementations. FoxMeyer Drug, for example, claims that its system helped drive it into bankruptcy. Using examples of both successful and unsuccessful ES projects, the author discusses the pros and cons of implementing an enterprise system, showing how a system can produce unintended and highly disruptive consequences. Because of an ES's profound business implications, he cautions against shifting responsibility for its adoption to technologists. Only a general manager will be able to mediate between the imperatives of the system and the imperatives of the business.

David Martin, chief operating officer of Lexington Labs, was apprehensive about the upcoming meeting with his senior sales executives. Just a few years earlier, when the pharmaceutical company enjoyed extraordinary success, gatherings with the sales force had seemed like celebrations. But in the past 18 months, sales had begun to fall, as had earnings. And most of the top sales personnel had begun to focus on their own businesses as major changes swept through the health care industry. Martin sensed that the solution was a system to facilitate the flow of knowledge across borders. Sales executives needed to share vital information about products, customers, competitors, and selling techniques. But what kind of system would work best? Unfortunately, Martin's apprehensions were justified. The meeting only emphasized how fragmented the company had become. How can Martin get Lexington to function as one global company? In 96302 and 96302Z, Louise Goeser, Thomas H. Davenport, Barry Harrington, George Goldsmith, and G. Kelly O'Dea offer advice on this fictional case study.

David Martin, chief operating officer of Lexington Labs, was apprehensive about the upcoming meeting with his senior sales executives. Just a few years earlier, when the pharmaceutical company enjoyed extraordinary success, gatherings with the sales force had seemed like celebrations. But in the past 18 months, sales had begun to fall, as had earnings. And most of the top sales personnel had begun to focus on their own businesses as major changes swept through the health care industry. Martin sensed that the solution was a system to facilitate the flow of knowledge across borders. Sales executives needed to share vital information about products, customers, competitors, and selling techniques. But what kind of system would work best? Unfortunately, Martin's apprehensions were justified. The meeting only emphasized how fragmented the company had become. How can Martin get Lexington to function as one global company? In 96302 and 96302Z, Louise Goeser, Thomas H. Davenport, Barry Harrington, George Goldsmith, and G. Kelly O'Dea offer advice on this fictional case study.

Describes the six steps included in most reengineering initiatives: selecting the processes for reengineering; identifying change enablers; developing a business vision of process objectives; understanding and measuring existing processes; designing and prototyping the new processes; and implementing the new processes.

Explores the origins of reengineering; its evolution during the 1980s and 1990s; the current state of reengineering, which is prevalent in business today; and several possible futures of reengineering, specifically in relation to process management, knowledge work, and participative work design.

A proposal for reengineering the order management process of an HVAC products and services company receives only half the funding it needs. The proposal appeared to offer a very high return on investment, but would require substantial funding and dramatic changes in work processes and the information technology required to support these processes. The firm's president must decide whether to fully fund the reengineering effort and how quickly to roll out the new program.

IT specialists often promise that technology will serve as a catalyst for change. But, as the author points out, it is a promise that usually goes unfulfilled. IT managers put too much emphasis on hardware and not enough emphasis on the soft science of how people actually share information. Too many managers still believe that, once the right technology is in place, appropriate information sharing will follow. To achieve its promise IT needs to take a human-centered approach. Looking at companies that have successfully addressed this problem--like Symantec Corp., Chemical Bank, Hallmark Cards, and Rank Xerox, U.K.--the author directly addresses how to rebuild an organization's information culture and how to get beyond the technologies to changing people's behaviors.

In this case study, presented in the form of electronic mail messages sent within Middleton Mutual, the CIO is trying to introduce the company to expert systems. But the new systems would cost about $1 million, and the capital expenditure committee is leaning against the idea. Irma Wyman, vice president of corporate information management for Honeywell, Inc.; Thomas L. Pettibone, vice president, information systems, for New York Life Insurance Co.; John D. Loewenberg, senior vice president, corporate information systems, Aetna Life & Casualty; and Diogo Teixeira, systems consultant at McKinsey & Co. discuss the case.

A major obstacle to the implementation of information technology is the lack of understanding between company technical experts and senior managers. One way to blend both perspectives is to establish a task force that solicits input from management and creates a set of principles to guide subsequent investments in IT. By drawing on 10 to 15 statements that reflect management's basic beliefs about how the company should use IT, the task force translates the language of corporate strategy into computerese. These statements, or principles, can help speed up the decision-making process and ensure that every IT investment helps the company achieve its strategic goals.

Describes the organizational components of the typical IT organization in a large corporation. Points out common problems and issues for each component of the organization. Also addresses the leadership issues for the IT function, and focuses specifically on the Chief Information Officer role. A rewritten version of an earlier note by L.M. Applegate.