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Box 6.5
An example: J. P. Morgan Chase

Reuse KM initiatives have taken hold at LabMorgan, the Internet strategy and incubation
unit of J. P. Morgan Chase & Co. The lab uses Intraspect Software technology to help
employees fi lter the hundreds of business-plan referrals received for investment or incuba-
tion possibilities each month. The platform lets users access all previous expertise and
feedback on similar propositions the company has received, so they can measure new
proposals against them and know what questions to ask to further probe a new plan ’ s
merits. Since the deployment, the lab says it has been able to avoid duplicate screenings
of similar proposals and has generated signifi cant gains.
But the lab thought fi rst about how it works as an organization before jumping into
the technology. “ The collaborative tool pushed thinking about our processes and how we
work together, ” Feldhusen says. “ The core has to be a mind-set of sharing and accomplish-
ing a common goal. We designed the software to support the processes we use. ” But she
acknowledges that deploying KM initiatives might be more challenging in dealing with
very established processes. “ How do you motivate people to move to new ways? [Our
advantage is that] we ’ re in an area that ’ s highly innovative. ”

approach that has been outlined in this chapter. Markus ’ s types of knowledge reuse
situations are:
1. Shared work producers, who produce knowledge they later reuse
2. Shared work practitioners, who reuse each other ’ s knowledge contributions
3. Expertise-seeking novices
4. Secondary knowledge miners
Shared work producers usually consist of teams or workgroups who have collabo-
rated together. A common example is a physician who consults a patient ’ s chart to
see what medications had been prescribed recently by other members of the practice;
or special education teachers and therapists who share student fi les to see what
sorts of interventions worked and which ones did not have any effect. This is the
easiest form of knowledge reuse as everyone is quite familiar with the knowledge
content — they share the same context, which makes knowledge application rapid and
effective.
Shared work practitioners are members of the same community of practice. They
are peers who share a profession. This form of knowledge reuse will require a higher
degree of fi ltering and personalization, typically done by CoP knowledge librarians.
Reusers would need more reassurance about the source ’ s credibility — they would need