Baumbusch is working with repairmen in one territory to learn from the best by following them around or bringing them together to swap notes. Knowledge thus identified can be replicated and shared. What's important is to find useful knowledge, bottle it, and pass it around. Cigna Corp. is two years into an impressive effort to improve operations. Restructuring and reengineering led by Gemini Consulting played big parts in the turnaround but weren't the whole story.
Excellence comes from making more knowledgeable choices.
There were experts, but not a good means of extracting and publishing that know-how. In underwriting, Cigna gave home-office managers the additional job of building and maintaining a knowledge base, housed in the same software that every underwriter uses to process applications. Claims processors and agents have similar setups. They were collecting all the information anyway, but it just went in the files. Third, structural intellectual capital can help companies stay lean.