Interview with Dan Holtshouse
| Date | 01 January 2006 |
| Published date | 01 January 2006 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/03055720610734809 |
| Pages | 49-51 |
| Author | Michael Stankosky |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
EXECUTIVE INTERVIEW
Interview with Dan Holtshouse
Dan Holtshouse started the Knowledge Initiative at Xerox ten years
ago with the CEO’s backing and positioned the initiative as a strategic
imperative reporting into the Chief Strategy Office. Under Dan’s
mentorship, the Xerox Knowledge Management program has been
cited as a benchmark for implementation in large global enterprises
and has received over a dozen awards for knowledge management
(KM) excellence. The knowledge theme at Xerox has been largely
institutionalized around knowledge sharing with the granddaddy
Eureka System in the large service organization still running continuously for over ten
years.
Dan actively brought into the Xerox experience best practices and thought
leadership from outside the company in an effort to benefit from others’ lessons
learned. This “outside in” approach throughout the KM journey has kept him active in
the KM movement with close ties to academia, benchmarking consortia, KM thought
leaders, and KM practitioners around the globe. Dan has recently “graduated” from
Xerox and is shifting more of his attention to industry research and academia to help
define advanced concepts for “The Enterprise of the Future.” Here he talks to Michael
Stankosky about the knowledge management movement.
Dan, you have been involved in knowledge management since the beginning of the
movement in the 1990s. What’s been the most enduring aspect of the movement?
In the early days, there were essentially no books, case studies, or journals to learn
from so we were forming industry networks and benchmarking to learn from each
other. From these activities, we mapped dozens of seemingly diverse KM efforts into
ten domains. The ten domains included knowledge sharing, mapping communities of
expertise, leveraging intellectual assets, embedding know how into products and
services ... and so on. From my point-of-view, knowledge sharing emerged as the
number one expression of the KM movement and it continues to be the enduring quest
of the knowledge movement. The key challenge to this day is how to illicit the
voluntary sharing among workers.
The knowledge initiative at Xerox has been cited, benchmarked and case studied for
its breadth, depth, and endurance over the past ten years. Is there any one success factor
that stands out?
One can not always be sure in hindsight, but I believe our decision to go “light at the
top” and “heavy at the bottom” was key. Corporate wide leadership was established in
the strategy office, but 90 percent of the activities were anchored in the business units.
We simultaneously recruited and mentored voluntary working champions in research,
engineering, customer service, product planning, marketing, and the quali ty network.
These folks are the ones who carried the knowledge movement into the deep operations
Executive
interview
49
VINE: The journal of information and
knowledge management systems
Vol. 36 No. 1, 2006
pp. 49-51
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0305-5728
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