We have some 2,000 agents out there in Canada alone that know a whole lot about our customers. But I don't think we are as good as we need to be at capturing the insights that these people carry. So we are really working hard at building a customer-knowledge capability. What is happening with a lot of IT systems is that companies are building an information mountain that people are buried in, rather than on top of, because they don't have the tacit knowledge to interpret it. Knowledge is made up of explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge.
Most managers think only of the explicit knowledge.
So what is happening with a lot of IT systems is that companies are building an information mountain that people are buried in, rather than on top of, because they don't have the tacit knowledge to interpret it. I think it calls for more of a cultural solution than a technical solution. One way is by building communities of knowledge where people work together in a relatively small group to derive and marshal insights from information. Each community should have some common purpose, an affinity of task or an affinity of occupation. For instance, we might build a sales-management community by bringing together 20 or so of our good sales agents and letting them interact with those mountains of information through a shared database.