Katenback and Smith (Harvard Business Review, March 1993) list seven properties characteristic of good teams. The Divisions of Information Assurance and Information Technology and Engineering exemplified these properties by designing, developing, deploying, and evaluating the ISIS Knowledge Bank (IKB), an advanced knowledge management system.

(1) Shared leadership. This was a joint project lead by Jeff Collmann, Adil Alaoui, and Willie Wright representing the Division of Information Assurance and Informatics, the Division of Information Technology and Engineering and TATRC.

(2) Individual and mutual accountability. All members of the team have specific responsibilities upon which they report at weekly meetings.

(3) Specific team purpose that the team itself delivers. This team delivered the IKB to ISIS on time and within budget.

(4) Collective work-products. The IKB team as a whole designed, documented and executed training for ISIS users. Each member of the team has responsibility for supporting a specific division within ISIS in their use of the IKB.

(5) Encourage open-ended discussion and active problem-solving meetings.
- The team jointly prepared a Request for Proposal and evaluated all responses.

- The team identified the key requirements for the IKB through a series of weekly meetings.

- To prepare the RFP, the team invited four vendors to demonstrate their products.

- After understanding the requirements and vendor offerings, the team prepared and issued a Request for Proposal.

- The team received the response. To evaluate the response, the team met to review and score vendors responses to each requirement. The team summed the individual’s scores for each requirement, debated the overall merit of each product and made a collectively choice.

(6) Measures performance directly by assessing collective work-products.
- The team established and met all milestones within the year of the project.
- The team purchased an application that met all requirements for the amount of funding ISIS had to spend on the project.

(7) Discusses, decides, and does real work together. The team’s performance as outlined in the proceedings six properties clearly demonstrates its collective work process.