Interview with William Millward, founder and CEO, Addx Corporation

Citation

(2008), "Interview with William Millward, founder and CEO, Addx Corporation", VINE, Vol. 38 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/vine.2008.28738daa.003

Interview with William Millward, founder and CEO, Addx Corporation

Article Type: Executive interview From: VINE: The journal of information and knowledge management systems, Volume 38, Issue 4

Dear Michael: Thank you again for inviting me to VINE. In preparing for this interview, I explored several recent issues and enjoyed a reunion of sorts with many of the distinguished contributors with whom it has been a privilege to collaborate. Their leading research brought back many fond memories. As you know, though, I chose a slightly different path.

Six years ago out of a combination of entrepreneurial DNA and a passion for KM I founded Addx Corporation. While others enjoyed pursuing the excellent discussions about “transforming data into knowledge”, I found equal passion in helping customers become more productive through KM. While success lies in the eye of the beholder, customer response to our KM and other service offerings is recognized by several awards including most recently a 2007 Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Private Company in America honoree and inclusion in the 2007 Washington Technology Fast 50.

As CEO, what vision and mission do you have for your company?

To set the context for the response for this question, I digress briefly on founding Addx. My earliest challenge was to think through how to grow a business successfully around my KM experience. To grow Addx, we had to clearly answer Peter Drucker’s five most important business questions:

1. 1.

   What is our mission?

2. 2.

   Who is our customer?

3. 3.

   What does the customer value?

4. 4.

   What are our results?

5. 5.

   What is our plan?

Through successive cycles, we learned that questions (2) and (3) were clearly the most important, daunting, and the hardest to understand. This is a key takeaway for KM practitioners.

Our customers are dedicated, they are focused on accomplishing a mission they believe in beyond themselves, and they are also frightfully short on resources, namely available time. These same customers are also smart, often courageous, mostly practical, and they understand the difference between the art of the possible and that of the improbable.

With this understanding, I decided very early that we needed to anchor our offerings in the applied sciences. Only through proven science based methodologies would we be able to deliver viable solutions to customers such that they would receive the greatest value. While much of the research in the knowledge management community was personally rewarding, I found that it was more theoretical and not necessarily connected to solving customer needs. Therefore I set the basis for Addx offerings on information and management sciences, and to provide such offerings through management consulting, technology, and program management services. Broadly defined, information sciences concern the intake, processing and dissemination of information (plus feedback loops, learning, etc. – KMers are tough crowd!). Management sciences address the use of this information for better decision making.

Further, my own purpose in starting Addx was and remains to create an enduring enterprise that continued through succession beyond me. This, along with the founding basis, shaped our Vision and Mission statements:

Vision: As an enduring market leader in information and management sciences solutions we will accelerate building the nation’s prosperity by changing the way people work.

Mission: To serve customers and provide them with value-oriented information and management sciences solutions that help them succeed. To deliver on this promise, we commit to hire, train and retain the very best employees, and enable them to innovatively and excellently serve our customers.

What do you offer that is unique from your competitors?

Our offerings are science based. For instance, one of the greatest challenges facing customers today is to remain relevant and agile in serving their customers or accomplishing their mission. Information science defines a relationship that helps shape solutions that help with this challenge. Specifically, agility is proportional to information flow and inversely proportional to infrastructure. Most organizations who want to become more agile cut back on infrastructure but often miss the opportunity to increase information flow in an appropriate manner.

You have been around KM since the beginnings, and clearly know the major players and programs. Would you provide the readers with your insights on KM; why it has not taken hold as other disciplines, such as information management. Is KM dead?

Answering this question depends on perspective. From a theoretician’s point of view – paid perhaps through grants or research funding – life might be good. From a practitioner’s point of view – paid by customers – life can be very good or really bad. My first-hand practitioner’s experience is if customers are not buying your products and services then they do not see the value. Our reason for shifting to and marketing information sciences was its actual value.

KM is real and therefore presents an opportunity. However, it also needs a couple of “quick wins” in order to reenergize the customer base. I do not know if this practical type work is taking place.

What do you consider the next big technology and business model?

Near term, Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is transforming the net and how we work. This is driving new point of service type business models while reinvigorating more traditional models. Instead of data being moved to the processor, through IPv6 and other supporting technologies we are seeing processors moving toward the data. Longer term, nanotechnology and its application to a variety of domains to include biology, energy, infrastructure, consumer products, and national security will yield unprecedented prosperity.

If you could implement any changes in the business and management schools today, what would they be?

This is a difficult question due to the highly competitive nature of these institutions. Business and management schools need to focus on reducing the graduate’s time to talent once they enter the workforce. In an era of mass customization, this is a formidable task but well equipped students can persevere. Teaching students the fundamentals of creativity and how to use their imagination will equip and sustain not only them, but also benefit the corporation. In Alex Osborn’s 1948 book, Your Creative Power: How to Use Your Imagination, he writes that “first-hand experience provides the greatest fuel for creative power”. Business and management schools need to teach the fundamentals through first-hand experience. Move quickly from theory to practice as the emerging graduate is fast and agile.

About Addx Corporation

The name Addx is derived from an antelope species and represents speed and agility. Our success and unwavering focus is simple: listen to our customers and clearly understand their needs, develop creative and innovative solutions based on information and management sciences principles, and deliver solutions with excellence.

Today, Addx Corporation is engaged with over 15 government agencies and commercial customers with the primary goal of helping them accomplish their objectives and achieve enduring value from our services. By way of original thinking through proven information and management sciences methods, Addx envisions and defines the possible, and combines service excellence, responsive delivery, and efficient implementation to achieve uncommon results.

About the interviewee

William Millward founded Addx Corporation in 2002 to provide information and management sciences expertise to public and private sector clients. As a career Naval Officer with warship command, Mr Millward was involved in developing the underlying concepts of Network-Centric Operations. This experience led to post naval career work in information and knowledge management, where he directed Arthur Andersen’s Office of Government Services knowledge management practice and served as an Adjunct Professor in Knowledge Management at The George Washington University. Mr Millward is a graduate of the US Naval Academy and holds advanced degrees from Old Dominion University and the US Naval War College. He resides in Virginia. William Millward can be contacted at: wmillward@addxcorp.com