Interview with Glenn S. (Sam) Hunter Jr

Citation

Stankosky, M. (2007), "Interview with Glenn S. (Sam) Hunter Jr", VINE, Vol. 37 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/vine.2007.28737aaf.001

Interview with Glenn S. (Sam) Hunter Jr

Interview with Glenn S. (Sam) Hunter Jr

Glenn S. (Sam) Hunter Jr is the Assistant Commissioner, Office of Applied Science, within the Public Building Service of the General Services Administration (GSA) in Washington, DC. His experiences range from leading real estate efforts for multinational corporations and financial institutions to leading consulting teams for major consulting organizations. Recognized globally as a leader and pioneer in multiple disciplines within the real estate profession, Sam has worked with many of America’s leading corporations including IBM, Booz Allen Hamilton, CB Richard Ellis, and GTE (now Verizon). He has also consulted with McDonald’s, Aetna, Levi Strauss & Co., Colgate-Palmolive, Westinghouse, DuPont, Prudential, NEC, Kodak, Ford, and EXXON.

Sam joined the GSA three years ago to develop the Office of Applied Science. The Office of Applied Science was created to provide critical support to the Public Building Service in its mission: “To provide superior workplaces for federal customer agencies at good economies to the American taxpayer”.

The Office of Applied Science serves as the repository of expert knowledge and resources for the Public Building Service. Its areas of expertise include, Research, Expert Services, Regulatory Study and Advocacy and Knowledge Management. The Expert Services we provide include Energy, Sustainability, Environmental, Workplace Design and Childcare.

Sam graduated from the University of Arizona and remains active in several real estate organizations, including ULI and CoreNet. He is also serving his fourth three year term on the National Board of Advisors to the Karl Eller Graduate School of Management at the University of Arizona.

What are your greatest challenges to accomplish your objectives?

First, Knowledge Management is new to GSA, at least relative to how it has evolved in the real estate industry. There have been several attempts made to create a KM program within the agency. Those efforts were led by some very smart people, but were not successful. Either the time was not right or their efforts were not well supported. I think this is the right time and I think we have the right kind of support at GSA.

We are also faced with a couple of other major challenges. It has been repeatedly stated that over the next five years approximately 50 percent of our work force becomes eligible to retire. Most of that attrition will come from the leadership ranks of our workforce. Every time I attend a retirement party, I can’t help but think about the lost knowledge that is about to walk out the door. Over the past several years we have made great strides in documenting our processes and collecting best practices. Perhaps the greatest contribution we can make, the most value we can add, is to collect, develop and find creative ways to apply our combined intellectual knowledge. If we do nothing more than act as a retention basin for our collective knowledge we will have provided a great service.

But we can do so much more. If the GSA is to embrace Knowledge Management we need to establish how to measure its value and communicate that value to our leadership; we must reevaluate how our associates approach and accomplish their work; and we have to convince our leadership that we must analyze and adjust our corporate culture as required.

How and why did you get connected with Knowledge Management (KM)?

I think I have always dabbled in Knowledge Management without knowing that’s what I was really doing. During my career, I have worked for several knowledge based companies, including, IBM, Hughes Aircraft Company and Booz Allen Hamilton. In knowledge based companies you pride yourself on collecting best practices if only for your own toolbox. Long before it was fashionable I had files filled with better ways to do things that would make me a better salesman or real estate executive or consultant. So I guess that intuitively, I was leveraging the collective wisdom of people and organizations I had never met to help me increase my value to my customers and my organization by making myself more responsive and innovative in the work I accomplished. That is about as close to Knowledge Management as I had come before coming to GSA.

When I was approached to consider joining the GSA and directing the work of the Office of Applied Science, the organization contained an element called Knowledge Management. I knew very little about formal KM. I immediately set about reading everything I could get my hands on. Tom Davenport, Larry Prusak, Nancy Dixon, Carla O’Dell became my tutors. My introduction to KM was, in fact, the Complete Idiot’s Guide to Knowledge Management by Melissie Rumizen. Along the way, I have had the opportunity to work with some wonderful consultants like Carl Frappaolo of Delphi Group and Adriaan Jooste of Deloitte Consulting, who without batting an eye were always there for us.

Dan Holtshouse, who started the Knowledge Initiative at Xerox, is an old friend, but we had never talked about what we did at work. Imagine my surprise when he turned out to be an expert in the field! Dan is now working on his Doctorate next door at George Washington University and we are exploring ways to partner in the areas of both KM and Workplace solutions. The whole KM group at George Washington University has helped light the fire under us and frankly keep it fueled.

Can you tell us how you went about implementing KM throughout your organization, and how do you measure success?

The need for an enterprise-wide focus on knowledge management came about as the result of the last major PBS National Office reorganization in 2003. The reorganization pointed out many areas in which an enterprise-wide KM program could assist PBS in becoming a more customer-centric organization. Originally, the focus was on creating a division to support IT systems efforts that had a knowledge management connection, such as the internal PBS Portal. However, we soon recognized that a more holistic approach to our KM effort was needed. We recognized that IT alone is certainly not a strategy, and we set about developing a more comprehensive KM strategy.

I attended a seminar at Microsoft in 2004 and one of the speakers was you, Mike, as you may remember. One of the things you recommended was to take an inventory and then build on that inventory to develop a strategy. We did that with the assistance of Perot Systems and the Delphi Group. We conducted a relatively brief, PBS-wide, KM assessment. Data from that assessment enabled us to develop a strategy that ultimately focuses on collaboration, as reflected in our tag line: “PBS Knowledge Management – Tapping the power of collaboration: capturing and sharing organizational knowledge to learn, innovate, and succeed”.

Measuring the success of the PBS KM program is a work in progress. Like most enterprise-wide KM programs, we struggle with what to measure, and how to measure it. We are both helped and hurt by the OMB-mandated Performance Management Process. On the one hand, it gives us a structured means by which to measure our program against agreed-upon agency goals in a balanced scorecard fashion. On the other hand, even with that approach, the success of an enterprise KM program is primarily in the intangibles; in our case, better collaboration and knowledge sharing. While putting a few hard numbers to our performance measures, such as increasing collaboration by 20 percent, we still struggle with exactly what meaningful metrics to use to garner performance data.

Is KM here to stay or a passing fad?

Peter Drucker suggested in his book, Management Challenges for the 21st Century, that “Knowledge-worker productivity is the biggest of the 21st-century management challenges.”. He describes the process of increasing knowledge-worker productivity as the first “survival requirement” in a developed country.

While I could quote Drucker all day, I think the bottom line is we must continue to improve the productivity of our knowledge workers if we are going to remain competitive in the world market. One of the best ways to do that is through an effective KM program. Effective KM has become a requirement to compete in the world market. It is no longer a differentiator. I truly believe that the enterprise that chooses not to invest in KM will be left behind. Knowledge Management is here to stay.

Any other insights you can offer to our readers?

My first insight would be to hire the best people you can afford. Hire people that are creative and passionate about the work they do. We have been fortunate. My KM Director, Laura Moore puts it this way. “To be truly successful you have to be a KM evangelist, a zealot. You need to paint the vision picture every day, and the picture changes, depending on the audience. You are the major change agent. At the end of the day, KM is about getting people to change the way they do and even think about their job.” Hire people like Laura!

My second insight would be to listen carefully to those elements of government, industry and academia that have demonstrated a commitment, passion, understanding and application of key KM success drivers. As I have described it the KM community is a bit of a fraternity. It is small and everyone is willing to help. Listen carefully and learn.

Michael Stankosky