Quantified KM value story 124

This story comes from the same article from HBR I referenced yesterday, entitled “What managers need to know about social tools“.  It shows some of the value in seeking and sharing knowledge in a networked world. Here’s the story.

“At the insurance company we studied, one employee, Sheila, was asked by her manager to put a hold on her current project and perform an urgent analysis for a new vertical market. She told her manager that the analysis would most likely take two weeks, pushing her current project past the deadline and over budget. The manager was willing to pay that price.

“As Sheila began to dig into the problem, she remembered a series of exchanges on the internal social tool among colleagues in another department about a project they were working on in that same vertical market. With this metaknowledge, she sent them a note asking if they could suggest where to start. They replied that they had completed a market analysis and asked if she would like to see it. Sheila said that when she received the report, “I couldn’t believe it. It was exactly what my boss asked me to do. This just saved me two weeks, and it saved my project over a million dollars. I had no idea they were working on this. Neither did my boss.”