Preparing
for Conversations with Tom Barfield
Maintaining
P to P During Rapid Growth
Tom
Barfield
Capability Development / Global KM Lead
Accenture
St. Charles, IL, US
 Introduction
Tom Barfield has
his arms around what probably is the world's largest knowledge
management program. Accenture, a global management consulting,
technology services and outsourcing company employs 135,000 people
in 48 countries and had a net revenue of $15.5 billion in 2005.
Accenture has long
been well known for its success in training and knowledge management,
but maintaining excellence since the year 2000 has been a major
challenge as the company's rapid growth brought tens of thousands
of new people into the organization.
Tom Barfield is
in a somewhat unique position working in capability development
and knowledge management and at the same time collaborating in
the areas of training and learning. If KM is truly holistic,
then Tom Barfield works in an environment where the multiple
values of KM can shine.
Please do your homework
here before participating in the STAR Series Dialogue with Tom
Barfield. Pay special attention to Tom's biography which is better
described as personal reflections and includes a broad list of
KM topics he is particularly interested in. We've chosen Maintaining
Person to Person During Rapid Growth as the opening theme, but
what we have here is a super-techie well connected to the human
side of KM. There's an opportunity here to better understand
the synergy of KM and IT.
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Biography
(Personal Reflections)
Little did I know
upon graduating from Bradley University in 1991 (with a degree
in Industrial Engineering) that 15 years later I'd be in a role
directing a knowledge management program for 135,000 people at
Accenture. It is odd to look back on a career and finding the
thread that connects the dots to bring me to this position.
Coming out of school
my vision for myself was that would build my career in a manufacturing
setting - solving problems in an effort to make whatever operation
I was a part of run smoothly and efficiently. Indeed I
did have some of those opportunities but when Accenture (then
Andersen Consulting) made an offer to develop manufacturing software
(I was a terrible programmer in co llege) I decided
that I had never tried that before, it would be good on the resume
after three years. Three years later I was hooked on the
work and the culture and decided to shift my focus from manufacturing
to training - building computer based training. While initially
this shift was driven my desire to get out of the mainframe world
and into the PC world it turned out to have a much larger impact
on my career. After two more years developing software (including
a virtual reality training application that taught object technology
concepts) my focus began to morph into a focus on removing the
barriers between people and the things they need to be successful.
In the beginning my focus was on training barriers but it has
widened to content and recently to the barriers between people.
Over the last six
years I have:
- Played a lead roles
in the vision, planning and coordination of the build out of
Accenture's learning management system (myLearning), enterprise
search capability and knowledge sharing infrastructure (Knowledge
Exchange)
- Reset our knowledge
strategy which involves a tighter integration with our training
program, centralization of our knowledge management approaches,
leveraging of geo-sourced resources and an increased focus on
connecting people with each other
- Hot buttons for
me right now include: Shift from a one-size-fits-all knowledge
sharing approach to one that is tailored to unique needs, integrating
knowledge sharing into the workflow of users, moving the knowledge
management function from one that tends to take orders to one
that is viewed as strategic business partner to our leadership,
developing a holistic people to people approach that doesn't
overwhelm users with too many options (blogs, CoPs, discussions,
expert networks, wiki's).
I am on a journey
finding that there continues to be and will always be opportunities
to learn, grow and be challenged. It feels like the older I get
the more I discover I need to learn. I feel fortunate and blessed
that I am in an environment that gives me so many challenges
- giving so many opportunities to learn.
BTW - My wife Lynda
and I live in St. Charles, IL with our three kids - Emily (8),
Ryan (5) and Kaelyn (3).
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Pre-Dialogue
Remarks
Accenture's knowledge
strategy has historically been more focused on content, ensuring
we had the best content for our most strategic content areas
and that this content was easy to access. Connecting people with
each other was not emphasized due to the strong personal networks
that naturally developed in our organization. Accenture has had
formal capabilities to connect people with each other (expert
networks, discussions and Communities of Practice) though they
have only been used in pockets - usually based on requests from
leaders with a passion for one type.
So what has changed
that made us feel a new focus on connecting people to people
is necessary? Here are a few of factors:
- Creating personal
networks in a 135,000 person company located around the world
is a lot harder than it was 15 years ago when we had 25,000 people.
- We are rapidly
growing - we have hired over 30,000 people in each of the last
two years.
- We have shifted
from a recruiting approach that was focused on hiring directly
out of colleges to one that is increasingly bringing in experienced
hires who need to quickly learn the Accenture culture and create
their personal networks.
- The value Accenture
brings to its clients is based on the knowledge and experience
of its people. The better Accenture is at tapping that experience
- extending beyond existing personal networks - the more value
we can bring to our clients
We are finding that
it is very easy to be drawn to the shiny new capabilities/tools
that are increasingly becoming more available - Social Networks
(www.facebook.com,
www.linkedin.com),
blogs, wikis, communities of practice, discussion boards The
challenge is to focus on the most important business problems
and develop a people to people approach that best solves those
problems given the needs of an audience.
Topics:
- Approaches used
to keep a People to People strategy focused on business problems
and increasing the performance of the user.
- Communication strategies
that have simplified the people to people space for both business
leaders and end users
- Processes that
have been used to aid in choosing the best people to people approaches
for a given business problem
- Successful metrics
that have been effective at demonstrating the value of people
to people initiatives
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PDF:
Inside
Knowledge
Case Report
September 2006
Theory of Evolution
How Accenture moved from training to learning
At Accenture, training,
learning and knowledge work are all linked in structure and process
so seamlessly that it is impossible to say where one becomes
the next.
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