Premier 100: Managing knowledge at Wachovia

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Wachovia Corp. in Charlotte, N.C., is the fourth-largest bank in the U.S., employing more than 100,000 people at thousands of branch offices.

Four years ago, it was a traditional company with silos of people, processes, content and technology. Employees’ talents and information weren’t universally accessible; best practices weren’t shared across business units; information was difficult to find; the corporate intranet was a hodgepodge of more than 1,200 Web sites; and information-sharing wasn’t a cultural value.

That’s when the financial services company began to systematically build an increasingly sophisticated knowledge management process.

Thomas J. Kitrick, director of enterprise knowledge management at the bank, told an audience at the Computerworld Premier 100 conference here that the project has changed the way Wachovia works.

Today, employees are networked with clearly defined roles and responsibilities for knowledge-sharing. The business units publish processes and information to benefit workers inside and outside their departments. And the intranet provides the tools to publish and retrieve information.

Getting from there to here has been a three-phase journey that started with the “Knowledge Desktop,” an application that allowed call center employees to enter and access information in a departmental repository. That application was enabled by a document management system from Documentum Inc., collaboration tools from eRoom Technology Inc. (which has since been acquired by Documentum) and a search engine modeled after that of Yahoo Inc.

Two prerequisites to the success of Phase 1 were the building of a detailed corporate taxonomy so information could be named and indexed in very specific ways and a cultural shift around the need to share information, Kitrick said.

Phase 2 broadened the project in 2002 to include 20,000 users on the divisional level in “Knowledge Resource Centers.” Each departmental resource center included a knowledge resource group that met monthly to refine and re-engineer processes for publishing and retrieving information to ensure that employees were cooperating and that the repository was living and growing.

Finally came Phase 3, the “Knowledge Exchange,” which has extended the system throughout the corporation. “When you go across groups that don’t have much in common, there’s less reason to share,” Kitrick said. So at this level, the notion of reusability was introduced.

All large documents are broken up into chunks or objects that can be reused by others, he said. For example, the boilerplate fine print at the end of a legal document is an object that the legal department has entered into the repository for use on documents throughout the corporation. If the boilerplate wording changes, the legal department is responsible for changing the object in the repository so every employee will instantly have access to the new version. Leaders of the departmental knowledge resource centers meet quarterly to refine processes.

A huge challenge throughout the development has been what to do about the 1,200 pre-existing intranet sites, Kitrick said. Rather than kill them, the team decided to bring them into the process. Important business information contained on the sites is sent through a validation process and then added to the Documentum repository. Other content — such as the corporate volleyball schedule — is relegated to a separate Microsoft CMS repository with a very different look and feel from that of the highly validated business-content areas.

“You know immediately which area you’re in,” Kitrick said.

Pleasanton, Calif.-based Documentum has helped Wachovia tackle other organizational challenges, including questions about how long to keep a document and what to do when it’s no longer useful; concerns about document version control, which is especially important when multiple people collaborate on a document; issues of workflow, which involves the routing of documents through the system for appropriate approvals; the tracking of who wrote, edited and approved a document; and the need for security.