High-Tech Community Venture

Their solution was the rumble strip, a line of small bumps installed in a roadway or shoulder that makes a loud noise when run over by a car. Rumble strips have been available for nearly 50 years and are sold by at least 23 firms. Yet their presence on the nation's highways was negligible before state engineers in Pennsylvania helped perfect strip construction and installation in the 1980s. Other state and local highway officials became interested in using the strips, but they had trouble finding information on how to purchase or install them. So, they approached the FHWA.

FHWA engineers were ecstatic about the interest and eager to help make use of the strips more widespread, especially considering the agency's goal to reduce traffic fatalities by 20 percent over 10 years. FHWA became a conduit for information about the strips, a broker between states using them and those just hearing the rumbles.

The number of requests for information soon became unmanageable. At first, FHWA sent out paper copies of statistics and policies concerning the proper placement of the strips. But paper proved to be too static. It left states and localities with inaccurate or old data as new information emerged. FHWA knew there had to be a better way. Agency officials considered sending out CD-ROMs, but realized they could quickly become as outdated as paper. Their solution was to create a Web site. Without even knowing it, the agency had launched its first foray into knowledge management-the art of matching workers who possess a vital base of knowledge with others in need of that know-how.

Share and Share Alike

FHWA found itself at the center of an emerging community of practice, people organized around a central issue or mission-specific goal. After talking with a consultant, the FHWA created the Rumble Strips Community of Practice, a Web site where engineers from across the country could come for an ever-expanding collection of information.

"We are a technical organization," says Mike Burke, FHWA's chief knowledge officer, whose team created the Web site. "We have knowledge and expertise and want to be able to sit at a table and share it. We act as a broker of knowledge. We are also a facilitator. Because if there isn't a good answer, we tend to know who the movers and shakers are."

The Internet and collaborative technologies met most of Burke's needs, so his team focused less on the site's technical capabilities and more on the content. Jim Growney became the site's "champion." Growney is a highway safety engineer with FHWA's New York Division who has spent 12 of his 30 years with the agency working on highway safety. He says FHWA decided to go with the community of practice approach to knowledge management, because it enabled experts to directly interact with those who needed to tap their expertise. Some agencies have larger knowledge management initiatives that are vastly more complex than FHWA's and that depend on numerous technologies. Such systems typically rely on a Web-based portal augmented by search engines and online collaboration tools. The portal is the worker's conduit to data stored in a database or a larger data warehouse. Agencies can use middleware to give workers access to legacy systems through the Web. Knowledge management systems also can allow users to draw data from an organization's business intelligence, project management, human resources, finance and supply chain systems. Still, no matter how complex the technology, the goal of every knowledge management initiative is to facilitate collaboration and the sharing of knowledge, says Charlie Reid, a knowledge management expert with software developer Information Builders Inc.

The simple community of practice approach serves FHWA well through online discussion and the ease of posting and downloading data on the Web site. The agency has filled the site with research reports by state and federal highway safety engineers and policies on rumble strips. That information is updated automatically on the site. Participants in an electronic forum can ask questions and get quick and accurate answers from FHWA officials. State officials can download specifications that were successful elsewhere and copy them directly into proposals destined for the desks of rumble strip manufacturers. And the site contains testimonials and videos from states that are leaders in rumble strip installation. "The site facilitated peer-to-peer exchanges," Burke says.

In his role as the site's champion, Growney monitors all discussions and answers. And while he does provide expertise, he is not always the one who answers the questions. Other experts contribute their time and knowledge, and all the interactions are logged online, giving rumble strip neophytes a huge library to search to get up to speed on the topic.

Every community of practice needs a subject matter expert to monitor the site and weed out inaccurate information, Growney says. "It became evident that there was going to be a champion or manager of the site," he says. "There was a need for somebody with technical expertise to make sure the information was accurate and to respond to questions and issues that came up in the country and the world." The site has a diverse and international audience. Engineers from such countries as Japan and Korea have frequented it. Even opponents of rumble strips, including bicyclists, have hopped on the site to offer their two cents about how the strips could be installed without putting cyclists and pedestrians at risk.

The site racked up 60,000 hits a month almost immediately after its launch in January 1998. Six to eight months later, Burke says, the number declined. But visitors began to stay longer to look at what had become an exhaustive record of data about rumble strips.

Copying Success

FHWA's knowledge management program didn't stop once the site reached maturity. "We felt that if we could do a community of practice on rumble strips, that we could do them in other areas," Burke says. FHWA has created two new sites. One spreads information about crash-testing roadside barriers. The other brings together people working to improve highway signs.

Burke's office has had so many requests to build new communities of practice that he has had to step back and figure out how to get all the work done. The rumble strip site used Macromedia Inc.'s ColdFusion Web development platform. Yet Burke found the ColdFusion solution required too much programming to be easily copied. "There was such an initial outcry for our services that we said, 'We have to be able do this more quickly.'"

Burke's team looked for a way to create a template for building Web sites to support communities of practice. FHWA chose a solution built on Lotus Development Corp.'s Domino platform, which provides collaboration software, and messaging and document management capabilities. American Management Systems Inc. developed the template. Burke identified four technology areas every community of practice needs:

• A place for discussion.
• A place to share files that provides context (why a file is important) and the originator's contact information.
• A place to collaborate and comment on documents, with a mechanism for tracking updates to works in progress.
• A directory of who's who within the community of practice that provides information about participants' professional interest within the community.

Burke says his organization is a rather conservative one that depends on knowledge management initiatives centered on business cases or problems showing proven results. "We're into this 'show me' thing," Burke says. "Managers have to find a compelling need for knowledge management and apply it to a business case in order to make it real. People want to see if knowledge management and communities of practice work for them."

Burke followed his own advice when he created a find-the-expert system for his agency. He wanted to help match FHWA's issue-area experts with those who might require their know-how. So he and his staff created the FHWA Expertise Locator (www.highwayexpertise.fhwa.dot.gov), a Web site that lists experts by agency and topic, such as information technology, highway safety, emergency planning, engineering and the environment. Those categories break down into more specific areas. The environment category, for example, includes four different areas pertaining to air quality. Under these subsets, users can find the experts' contact information, work history and qualifications. As more organizations build sites on which people can collaborate, an experienced manager offers a few words of caution. Growney believes communities of practice must have a subject matter expert devoted to facilitating information exchanges and monitoring the Web site. If there is no champion, "the site loses its credibility," he says. Such a responsibility can be stressful because it often is added to an existing workload. Managers must provide the support and resources necessary for champions to properly handle such sites, Growney says. This includes not just money, but time.