From need to know to need to know - organizational communication

The customer's president was angry. "Our products depend on your components. It's bad enough when a component fails, but it's unforgivable if you don't install a replacement immediately!"

The ears of the president of the component manufacturer were burning from the phone call, and he quickly issued an edict to his direct reports: All replacement parts for the customer were to be shipped out overnight via express courier.

A month later, the furious customer called the component company to cancel all further orders. The reason? A replacement sent by surface mail had taken a week to arrive. "If you don't value our business any more than that," the customer said acidly, "you certainly won't miss it when its gone!"

Outraged at the loss of this key customer, the component manufacturer's president launched an investigation to determine how the blunder had occurred. Company executives quickly identified the culprit: a clerk in the mailroom who thought he was saving the company money by avoiding expensive courier charges.

The clerk had not been told of the presidents directive.

Traditionally, Corporations and Organizations Have followed the military dictum of making information available only on a "need to know" basis. Unfortunately, as the components manufacturer cited above learned, relying on traditional methods can lead to disaster.

Today there is a new criterion emerging for handling information. Ironically, the new criterion is also based on "need to know," but now the emphasis is on "know" rather than "need."

Converging Trends

A number of trends are converging to create this shift. At the structural level, the press of global competition is causing organizations to reduce the number of employees to the leanest level possible. Accompanying this reduction in size is a devolution in decision-making authority; decision-making authority is being pushed to ever lower levels within organizations.

Meanwhile, the nature of work itself has changed. Whereas in the past most employees produced physical output, today the most rapidly growing segment consists of "knowledge workers." Even jobs traditionally considered to be in production now have a knowledge component. For example, the big three auto makers in the U.S. are now hiring college graduates for the assembly line because they need employees able to identify and suggest quality improvements.

Finally, at the media level, employers have more channels of communication to reach their employees than ever before. To the traditional newsletters, meetings, magazines and video must now be added the Internet and intranets, all vying for employees' attention.

The convergence of these trends has dramatically changed the "Need to Know" model. The number of people in the organization who need information, the amount of information they need, and the means to deliver information all have increased. Yet, paradoxically, the real lesson of the component manufacturer is that its not always possible to know in advance who will need what information. Thus the imperative of the new model is that organizations must make as much information as possible available, while providing employees with the means -- and the responsibility -- to obtain that information.

Until recently, it would have been impossible for most organizations to adopt such an example. Their only media for disseminating information to employees were traditional "broadcast" channels (newsletters, videos, meetings, etc.) that deliver the same information to all. The "mass media" approach has numerous limitations, most of which can be summed up by "one size does not fit all." But the most serious limitation is that management determines what information to deliver, not the audience. In today's world, it is increasingly the case that what information is delivered won't meet employees' information needs.

The networking of computers, the development of "groupware" software (e.g. Lotus Notes) and the advent of intranets (web pages accessible only from within an organization) are changing all that. Designed to enhance collaboration within teams, networking software enables the work of one employee to be shared quickly with others in the group. While team members may work individually on various aspects of a problem, the others can learn about and take advantage of an individual breakthrough so as to maximize the overall progress of the team.

This enhancement of collaboration fosters a new approach to communication within an organization. Individual employees are encouraged to make the results of their efforts available to others. Using networks and the appropriate software, other employees have the ability to find and retrieve the information required from their colleagues. Instead of a central source broadcasting a single message to all employees, individual employees now have the means to go to the source and obtain the information needed.

Case History: Silicon Graphics

One place to see this new model at work in Silicon Graphics (SGI), headquarted in Mountain View, Calif. This manufacturer of high performance visual computing workstations and servers has some 11,000 employees, virtually all of whom have their own web page on SGI's intranet. New employees are also encouraged to create and "publish" their own pages.

The purpose of these web pages is not to improve employee relations. Instead, the pages are expected to serve as a repository for the information that the employee controls. The employee is encouraged to share this information with other employees by posting it to the intranet as soon as possible. To make this easy, SGI has developed its own tools that make the translation of information to hypertext markup language (html format -- the "language" of the Internet) easy.

The value to SGI is that employees can quickly and easily find information to help them do their own work more effectively. For example, an employee scheduled to meet with a customer can easily look up that customer's sales history, see the details of the last transaction, and check the status of any outstanding orders Thus he or she will be more knowledgeable about the customer relationship and better able to meet the customer's needs

In addition to helping the employee do his or her job better, this approach to information sharing helps eliminate interruptions caused by information requests from others. Or, as one employee said, "I created my web page so I wouldn't have to answer so many phone calls. If someone calls me for information, I ask if they've checked my web page. If they haven't, I suggest they call me back after they have!"

Because information is "published" by the person responsible, finding desired information is simplified. The inquiring employee only to know the general structure of the organization and follow the organization chart to the logical source.

Use of the intranet is not limited to lower-level employees in the organization. SGI executives also have their own individual pages, and they regularly use them as a means to share information with employees. SGI officials who give presentations or make speeches usually put the text and any accompanying visuals on their web site so others can use them. When a presentation is audio- or video-taped, the executive may also digitize these and make them accessible by employees.

Since SGI employees are accustomed to using the intranet daily, SGI can make the most of its internal home page. Thus "Silicon Junction," as the intranet is called, is a multi-purpose information resource with links to organization charts, help for standard software, and resources for other available information Perhaps most significantly, Silicon Junction features a dynamically changing bulletin board that can be updated with news about the company or the industry on short notice. Thus when SGI recently made a strategic acquisition, SGI employees read about it at the same time the news was given to the media. As a result, SGI employees make it a practice to keep the Silicon Junction page up on their screens and to refresh their screens periodically to be sure they keep up with what's happening in their company.

The SGI approach is, admittedly, not one that every organization can readily emulate. The high-end SGI workstations most employees use have sufficient power to double as a web server as well as a desktop machine. Few organizations will be able to justify the cost of providing every employee with a machine of this capacity. Likewise, the software that makes creating web pages so easy is proprietary to SGI.

The significance of this example is less the technology in use than the orientation toward communication. Rather than management disseminating the information it thinks employees want, employees seek out the information they need to achieve their objectives.

This is a major reversal in roles; many organizations locked into the "need to know" mind-set will find it difficult to accept. Yet as competition continues to increase, few organizations can afford not to try and enhance their employees' ability to make decisions. Had the components' organization described at the beginning of this article believed in making information generally accessible, perhaps the mail clerk would have checked on the status of the customer before consigning the replacement part to slow surface mail. Retaining that customer's lost business would have paid for a great deal of investment in communication.

In the old model, limitations in communication technology and the military philosophy of "need to know" resulted in organizations releasing only carefully filtered messages to employees, withholding the rest from all except those at the highest point of the organizational pyramid. In today's world, however, organizations must begin to keep their employees informed rather than ignorant. Ultimately, it is the employees themselves who must identify what information they need; the organization's role must be to make it readily accessible. Thus the shift from "need to know" to "need to know."

COPYRIGHT 1996 International Association of Business Communicators
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group