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The result of these efforts was to marginalize the middle management who had
previously acted as the gatekeepers for knowledge flows within the company. Many
employees positively embraced the new opportunity to voice their contributions out-
side the chain of command. As one manager observed, ‘With the global network in
place, it does not matter if you are a sales associate, a regional or district manager or
a corporate VP [Vice President] – everybody talks to everybody.’
The new IT systems supported and facilitated this new, egalitarian approach to
knowledge sharing. This was particularly evident with the development of online
forums where individual employees can post requests for advice and support in deal-
ing with specific for work problems. These forums, which are accessible only to com-
pany associates, are each divided into sections based on Buckman’s lines of business,
such as water treatment and leather.

>> ROLE OF COMMUNITIES
As seen in other companies, various forms of communities were developed within
Buckman to facilitate the sharing of knowledge across organizational boundaries.
Initially, such communities evolved informally as individuals contacted each other
to seek and to share knowledge for specific problems. These communities devel-
oped around the problem-solving forums that were established through the K’Netix
system. Over time, communities became more formalized as Buckman began to
provide support through the development of ‘forum specialists’. The role of forum
specialists was to respond to requests for help posted on discussion forums and to
codify the responses to make them available over a longer time period and to a wider
audience. Forum specialists worked to organize, validate and verify the responses to
requests before uploading them into a database to be available for re-use. This work
allowed front-line employees to continue serving customers while the specialists
devoted their time to capturing their knowledge in a re-usable form.
To illustrate this cooperative knowledge sharing, we can take a fairly typical exam-
ple of how the system operated in practice. This example has to do with a need for
specialist knowledge on ‘pitch control’. Pitch control involves working on removing
or minimizing the effect of pitch in the paper-making process. Pitch is made up
of sticky materials left over in the pulp fibres used in the paper-making process or
derived from adhesives or plastics in recycled fibres. Given the range of Buckman
Labs’ technical activities, there were frequent demands for knowledge of new or
esoteric domains. In this instance, knowledge of pitch control was required for a
work programme in an Indonesian pulp mill. When Dennis Dalton, who is based in
Singapore as Managing Director of all company activities in Asia, was proposing this
programme, he circulated a message through the K’Netix system requesting help
on how he could go about preparing it: ‘I would appreciate an update on successful
recent pitch-control strategies in your parts of the world’, he wrote.
A response came within a matter of a few hours from Phil Hoekstra in Memphis,
including a suggestion for the specific Buckman chemical to use as well as a refer-
ence to a Master’s thesis on the pitch control of tropical hardwoods, written by an
Indonesian student attending North Carolina State University. A further response

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