Managing Knowledge-Based Initiatives : Strategies for Successful Deployment

Raised between the Florida Gulf Coast and the Amazon rainforest, Stacy Land’s interest in Knowledge Management began early – although she didn’t call it that. Growing up among multiple languages and cultures gave her an early marker for understanding context, a lesson that served her well during her studies in comparative literature, graduate work in Linguistics, and early career as a stand-up trainer.Although she began on the technical side of solutions designed to empower and enable knowledge workers, she quickly moved into investigating the question of how to account for the most difficult to quantify variable: the human being in the equation. For the last 18 years, Stacy has maintained that knowledge-based focus, coupled with and around technology, moving between academia and business.In the mid 90s, while working for Indiana’s largest property and casualty insurance company, she led the effort to bring in the Internet, including Internet e-mail, and established the first ever web site for the Indiana-based firm. She also represented Indiana Farm Bureau as a Communications Expert in Central Asia for three weeks in conjunction with the Citizens Network for Foreign Affairs and USAID. Later, at Braun Consulting, she co-founded the firm’s first Knowledge Management department, which was developed to help integrate a newly acquired practice into the existing infrastructure.In 2002, at the nation’s largest healthcare provider, Stacy led the first Enterprise Knowledge Management effort, gaining C-level consensus and rolling nearly half of the firm’s teams onto the new collaboration and content platform in less than a year. After spending a few years at a multimillion-dollar management consultancy based out of Atlanta, Georgia, heading their Knowledge Management activities, Land is currently Director of Process and Quality, Senior Medical Management at USA-based WellPoint, Inc. where she holds responsibility around process, knowledge management, and communications.