Fast Company article # 11 "Ideas.com" By Chuck Salter September 1999 issue, page 292 Prepared by Vince Crary

I have used other Chuck Salter articles for this project. I chose this article because of the author, and I was not disappointed.

Chuck writes about Context Integration, a company that uses a program they designed to use the Internet and their company knowledge base which Context employees interact with to solve programming problems.

Context employs 200 people, and this is expected to expand to 350 in the year 2000. The consultants all work to solve challenges related to e-commerce technology.

No one is as smart as everyone - that is the idea behind Ian. IAN is the company's Intellectual Assets Network. This web-based knowledge system allows the Context people to draw on everyone in the company to help solve problems.

IAN was developed by Bruce Strong and Stan Ward, the company's chief methodologist. "We wanted to be better than our individual selves," says Strong. "If individual consultants could tap into what other people in the organization knew, they could work smarter and more productively. They could help one another on technically challenging projects, and, instead of solving the same problems over and over again, they could free themselves to attack new ones. So Strong and Ward developed IAN, which functions as a kind of group brain."

Strong and Ward got input for IAN's design by visiting every Context office and getting input from the people who would by using IAN. To me, this shows leadership, and it's most likely why the system has been user friendly, successful for the company, and used and expanded by Context's employees.

The article gets into how IAN is used, however, as the article states, "Yet IAN's real value lies not in the ideas and information the system stores, but in how that material affects work in the field."

Context recruits its people by the SWAN profile. SWAN stands for "Smart, hard-Working, Ambitious, and Nice." If people are not nice, they do not work for Context no matter how good they are. I feel it is this approach to hiring that will set Context's road to future growth and success. What is any organization but its people. Context has a neat approach for designing and problem solving e-commerce technology in the future.

I feel the majority of University of Minnesota Extension personnel meet the SWAN standards. As I get to know more people in the organization, most are smart, hard-Working, Ambitious, and Nice. Any organization is only as good as its people. I feel the SWAN method of recruitment would only enhance any organization.

In discussing this article with my wife since I am home on study leave now, we both agree Context is on the ball both with the IAN approach and with the SWAN approach. We were so impressed we tried to look up their stock. The Excite Search Engine came back with no hit, but I intend to keep looking. Context Integration sound like a good investment.

-- Anonymous, February 01, 2000

Answers

Vince,

I agree, I think most Extension staff do meet the SWAN standards. I wonder if they use a personality test when they hire people to help evlauate if the prospective employee meets the standards?

Joyce

-- Anonymous, February 10, 2000