A man who's mad about learning

By VICKI JAYNE

Murray McCaw is a four-finger typist. Hardly a rare condition among senior management; in fact, the chief executive of Infinity Solutions is probably two fingers ahead of many.

He cites it as a simple example of a phenomenon he finds enormously frustrating - benefits that are lost through lack of learning time.

"I can give you heaps of examples of organisations who invest thousands in new software or a new desktop environment but don't train people how to use it, so they don't gain the benefits it can give them.

"So many businesses have screwed up because they haven't taken into account the change management issues of putting in new systems."

It's a case where good old Kiwi do-it-yourself is misplaced.

"The approach is, 'I've got it, now I can teach myself to use it'. I taught myself how to play guitar 40 years ago but I'd be a much better guitarist if I'd had a few lessons.

"And if I'd learned to type properly instead of with four fingers, the efficiency gains would be huge."

The IT industry has, says McCaw, been a bad servant in not providing relevant training at a time and pace that suits customers.

Which is all part of why his company provides its clients with both infotech (IT) and human resource (HR) services. Its third string is assets management, which again is a more integral part of a solutions package (having both software and personnel components) than might at first appear.

Infinity Solutions emerged out of nowhere less than a year ago by stringing together what looked like fairly discrete speciality beads into a useful sort of knowledge necklace.

Resulting from the merger of three familiar names in the New Zealand scene - Trilogy Business Systems, Comtex Group and Madison Systems - plus wholly owned subsidiary RDT Pacific, it now has more than 450 personnel spread nationwide.

It is a case of the whole being more than the parts, says McCaw, in that the new entity can provide companies with integrated outsourcing solutions in areas that, while vital, are not their core business.

"These are all areas that have become more complex and where having all the necessary knowledge in-house would be too expensive for many New Zealand companies."

What Infinity Solutions provides is not one-off sales but an ongoing relationship that can be tapped into for advice, information, training and the like when and as needed. Meeting those needs is a responsibility in which the whole company is involved.

"You don't buy one piece of software or one individual's services when you buy us, you buy a total business."

The services are billed as "business enablement" and come from an outfit whose core values are pretty customer-centric, says McCaw. These values, which now inform all performance reviews and recruitment strategies, were thought up by 15 staff.

Including just one management team member and representing a broad cross-section of the company, they were charged not long after the merger with defining the new entity's values.

There are four: delivery of excellence to the customer; integrity (honesty/loyalty) with the customer; star teams, not teams of stars (and teams might include Infinity plus customer personnel); and the motto "live and love to learn".

It's probably the last that is closest to McCaw's heart. He recently attended a Harvard business course on managing diversified organisations. (Interestingly, most of the 26 participants, like him, found their organisations to have more synergy than diversity.)

Among the talk of unifying via shared visions, defining markets, optimising organisational structures and suchlike, the area that struck the biggest chord was to do with tapping into human resources.

"What we have there is a whole lot of talented people with a whole lot of skills and it's the way we utilise those people and the knowledge they have of our customers that allows us to make a difference.

"And I think that is the function of two areas, both of which I'm extraordinarily passionate about - one is knowledge management, the other is learning organisations. It's the way in which we do those two things that will set us apart."

In his organisation, knowledge management sits in the HR division, not in IT. It has to do with the capture and transfer of what each individual has learned about customers or service delivery - or avoiding mistakes.

"We're not great in this country at learning from our mistakes. I'm not going to penalise someone for making a mistake; what I'll crucify them for is not learning from that mistake.

"And once we do that learning, the question is how to share it and make sure nobody else in the company makes it [that mistake]. To take the positive side of that, when we do something really well, how do we share that so it can be built on?"

Top overseas companies are now finding ways to capture and sift the most repeatable and relevant aspects of such "soft knowledge".

They then shove it back out to those who need to know or can learn from it, says McCaw.

In New Zealand, such structured sharing of soft knowledge is still rare.

But that and the ability to become a truly learning organisation are, he believes, where companies can build the internal value needed to shift them from being information-age to knowledge-age companies.

* vjayne@iconz.co.nz