The reality of effective information sharing

Some interesting research on how good organizations share knowledge.

Do Talk to Strangers: Encouraging Performative Ties to Create Competitive Advantage


Imagine the following situation: You are a consultant who has just been assigned to a new project at your firm, and your first major presentation is in a week. Unfortunately, your client's problem isn't something you have any expertise in. You know for sure that others at your firm have dealt with this kind of situation before -- in the same industry, even -- but it would take hours to sift through the worldwide knowledge database to find those cases. Besides, you would emerge from that research with only a brief, names-and-numbers-expunged summary of the cases, not the real lowdown you need. What do you do?


Chances are, according to research by Sheen S. Levine, a Singapore Management University professor who recently received his PhD from Wharton, you would pick up the phone and make a call. In a recent study, Levine has found that often, what gives firms competitive advantage isn't just their repository of sheer knowledge, but their use and encouragement of so-called "performative ties" -- those impromptu communications made by colleagues who are strangers in which critical knowledge is transferred with no expectation of a quid pro quo. "Not many managers even understand that this happens, much less why," says Levine. "They think it's just friends helping friends. But it's not. Usually, people will reach out and connect with colleagues whom they have never met or talked to before. It's not dependent on prior or future favors."

This article has an interesting real world example.

Who Killed the Virtual Case File?


In the early 1990s, Russian mobsters partnered with Italian Mafia families in Newark, N.J., to skim millions of dollars in federal and New Jersey state gasoline and diesel taxes. Special Agent Larry Depew set up an undercover sting operation under the direction of Robert J. Chiaradio, a supervisor at the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Washington, D.C., headquarters.

Depew collected reams of evidence from wiretaps, interviews, and financial transactions over the course of two and a half years. Unfortunately, the FBI couldn't provide him with a database program that would help organize the information, so Depew wrote one himself. He used it to trace relationships between telephone calls, meetings, surveillance, and interviews, but he could not import information from other investigations that might shed light on his own. So it wasn't until Depew mentioned the name of a suspect to a colleague that he obtained a briefcase that his friend had been holding since 1989.

"When I opened it up, it was a treasure trove of information about who's involved in the conspiracy, including the Gambino family, the Genovese family, and the Russian components. It listed percentages of who got what, when people were supposed to pay, the number of gallons. It became a central piece of evidence," Depew recalled during an interview at the FBI's New Jersey Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory, in Hamilton, where he is the director. "Had I not just picked up the phone and called that agent, I never would have gotten it."