This 4-page paper is based on a Harvard Business Review case study of Buckman's technical knowledge-sharing ssytem called "K'Netix." Questions answered include the effectiveness of the system, how such effectiveness can be measured, as well as general lessons the case study provided in implementing this system.
Name of Research Paper File: D0_MTbuckma.rtf
Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
Buckman Laboratories, as the leading manufacturer of specialty chemicals for aqueous industrial systems, was a worldwide company with offices in more than 80 countries. The
company focused on selling more than 1,000 specialty chemicals at eight factories. There were 200 shareholders, featuring employees, directors and outsiders. When
founder Stanley Buckman died in 1978 of a heart attack, son Robert (Bob) Buckman wanted to take the company in a new direction, moving the company toward that of a
multinational global concern. He also wanted to change the way in which the management style was handled. Bob then moved the
company from being product-driven to one that was customer-driven by expanding the sales force, decentralizing operations and initiating a code of ethics. Best practices were also initiated into the entire
companys core belief system. Also initiated were methods by which the sales force could obtain information that would help them better service
their current customers and obtain new ones. The problem here, however, was that getting the information from point A (a source) to point B (the sales force) was often a
time-consuming and frustrating activity. This is why, during the early 1990s, Bob Buckman created the companys Knowledge Transfer Department (KTD), with its leaders reporting directly to the CEO. This was
also the beginning of KNetix, the information system that would supply necessary facts, figures and other data to Buckman employees and sales people. The first decisions were to put the
companys network on CompuServe (a public online service) and then to provide every Buckman salesperson with a leased notebook computer (complete with modem or other method of checking in). 1.What