Identifying Future Leaders Through Knowledge Management
Abstract: Simply retaining knowledge within an organization is not enough to ensure its survival unless talented employees are ready to leverage that knowledge. Changing demographics within the petroleum industry raises many concerns for the coming decade including the identification, development and retention of an organization's future leaders. An existing, advanced knowledge management (KM) community gives an organization's upper management a unique view into key employees' ability and willingness t… Show more
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Cited by 4 publications
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To meet the long-term technology and performance needs of the upstream industry, the present and future market must first be understood and then acted upon. A collaborative knowledge management (KM) system complements other market assessment tools by harnessing the collective capability and experience of an organization's employees to more effectively identify, communicate and act on customer needs, market knowledge and potential solutions. While many companies' KM efforts are focused on technical problem solving and/or employee development, a KM system can also be used to develop better organizational and individual understanding of, and more importantly, adaptation to the market. Any employee can initiate or participate in collaborative communication to actively share and discuss customer needs, competitor activities, new technology applications and successes. Any employee can submit ideas for new or improved products to meet their local market needs. Where appropriate, these ideas are collaboratively reviewed, improved and validated through KM. We use our KM system to better understand the market and drive innovation. Examples demonstrate the use of collaborative discussion to share market intelligence, clarify market assumptions, harness the 'wisdom of the crowd' in collecting and validating new product/service ideas and transfer technology. KM tools and collaborative activity show promising value in improving market understanding and driving technology innovation. Halliburton broadly defines knowledge management as a systematic approach to getting the right information to the right people at the right time. Often the 'right information' pertains to market needs, new ideas or new technology. Knowledge Management Effort Overview There are many definitions for knowledge management. Halliburton prefers "a systematic approach to getting the right information to the right person at the right time." This is an adaptation of the American Productivity & Quality Center's (APQC) definition: "A set of strategies and approaches to create, safeguard and use knowledge assets (including people and information), which allows knowledge to flow to the right people at the right time so they can apply these assets to create more value for the enterprise." The company's KM approach is centered on developing and supporting communities of practice that meet the needs of the organization. While providing access to common portal processes and tools, it is believed each community has unique needs and distinct business objectives. However for the purposes of this discussion, the precise definition of KM adopted by a company is not critical. What matters most is the level and type of collaboration among employees that a KM system enables. At the heart of these communities is the ability to communicate and collaborate around relevant topics. The collaboration tool enables anyone in the organization to:Ask a questionPush knowledge (best practice, idea, etc.) proactively to the communitySee the original question/issue and all replies in one placeReply with an answer or opinionLearn on demand by searching previous discussions and accessing managed content Issues involving one or more communities can be shared to increase collaboration and gain additional perspective. While these discussions typically involve technical or operational problem solving related to the communities, we see an increasing amount of collaboration occurring around planning, innovation and strategy. Dedicated knowledge brokers for each community provide full time administration to facilitate that community's KM effort.
To meet the long-term technology and performance needs of the upstream industry, the present and future market must first be understood and then acted upon. A collaborative knowledge management (KM) system complements other market assessment tools by harnessing the collective capability and experience of an organization's employees to more effectively identify, communicate and act on customer needs, market knowledge and potential solutions. While many companies' KM efforts are focused on technical problem solving and/or employee development, a KM system can also be used to develop better organizational and individual understanding of, and more importantly, adaptation to the market. Any employee can initiate or participate in collaborative communication to actively share and discuss customer needs, competitor activities, new technology applications and successes. Any employee can submit ideas for new or improved products to meet their local market needs. Where appropriate, these ideas are collaboratively reviewed, improved and validated through KM. We use our KM system to better understand the market and drive innovation. Examples demonstrate the use of collaborative discussion to share market intelligence, clarify market assumptions, harness the 'wisdom of the crowd' in collecting and validating new product/service ideas and transfer technology. KM tools and collaborative activity show promising value in improving market understanding and driving technology innovation. Halliburton broadly defines knowledge management as a systematic approach to getting the right information to the right people at the right time. Often the 'right information' pertains to market needs, new ideas or new technology. Knowledge Management Effort Overview There are many definitions for knowledge management. Halliburton prefers "a systematic approach to getting the right information to the right person at the right time." This is an adaptation of the American Productivity & Quality Center's (APQC) definition: "A set of strategies and approaches to create, safeguard and use knowledge assets (including people and information), which allows knowledge to flow to the right people at the right time so they can apply these assets to create more value for the enterprise." The company's KM approach is centered on developing and supporting communities of practice that meet the needs of the organization. While providing access to common portal processes and tools, it is believed each community has unique needs and distinct business objectives. However for the purposes of this discussion, the precise definition of KM adopted by a company is not critical. What matters most is the level and type of collaboration among employees that a KM system enables. At the heart of these communities is the ability to communicate and collaborate around relevant topics. The collaboration tool enables anyone in the organization to:Ask a questionPush knowledge (best practice, idea, etc.) proactively to the communitySee the original question/issue and all replies in one placeReply with an answer or opinionLearn on demand by searching previous discussions and accessing managed content Issues involving one or more communities can be shared to increase collaboration and gain additional perspective. While these discussions typically involve technical or operational problem solving related to the communities, we see an increasing amount of collaboration occurring around planning, innovation and strategy. Dedicated knowledge brokers for each community provide full time administration to facilitate that community's KM effort.
Many papers inside and outside our industry have discussed tapping into the 'wisdom of the crowd' to meet organizational needs. Many papers have also discussed the need - and methods - to innovate. So perhaps we need to ask ourselves how we can tap into the 'creativity of the crowd' to better understand what needs to change, identify opportunities for improvement or new market spaces to explore, share technologies across disciplines and industries and attract new types of talent. Cultivating and supporting innovation can be a significant challenge within any organization. Empowering people to generate new ideas should be a part of successful business organization. One should be mindful that innovation knows no boundaries and can happen for anyone at anytime. This becomes apparent within each of us when we ask "What if…?" There are several challenges in capturing these innovative thoughts in the proper context and putting them in front of the appropriate audience. This includes creating a mechanism for stakeholders to share their ideas, a process for management review and monitor submissions, the ability to bounce ideas off the 'wisdom of the crowd' and tools to connect the R&D effort to stakeholders throughout the development process. We have addressed this challenge through the creation of an IDEA system and using existing knowledge management tools to affect the development and commercialization process. The approach allows the entry and tracking of submissions through the process while maintaining intellectual property security. This paper discusses cases where these new tools and processes effectively managed and nurtured innovation within and between product service lines. Typical barriers that have hindered end users from sharing innovative ideas will be highlighted along with solution measures utilized. Finally, areas of future exploration related to the effort will be identified. Introduction Do you know those moments when you ask "what have we gotten ourselves into?" In late 2004, the management team of our division within a major oilfield service company challenged the marketing and knowledge management (KM) team to leverage our existing KM tools and improve the innovation process. A senior manager had read an article on James Surowiecki's book "Wisdom of Crowds", thought it made a lot of sense and wanted to see how our KM tools could allow the "crowd" of our employees to interact and collaborate on new ideas that could lead to new products and services. This sounded like fun and we took it on with a passion. Little did we realize the scope of the challenge. Three years later, we continue to explore and expand on our successes surrounding innovation. The challenge was generally aimed at improving the way new products are brought to market by filling gaps in the existing Innovative Product Commercialization (IPC) process (our company's product development and commercialization process) with a specific goal of greatly increasing the number of ideas filling the IPC pipeline. We're not alone. In the last few years, several books, papers and presentations inside and outside our industry have discussed tapping into the 'wisdom of the crowd' to meet organizational needs. Many more papers have also discussed the need - and potential methods - to drive innovation and research within the upstream oil and gas industry.
Communities of practice (COPs) are a sub-set of knowledge management (KM) that provide a channel for people to interact and collaborate to achieve common goals. Benefits of COPs include global problem solving, leveraging best practices, time savings, and identifying future leaders. Since the global adoption of COPs and KM efforts in our industry, most companies have seen a rapid decline in community activity after initial deployment resulting in KM becoming a failed corporate initiative. In the product life cycle, these communities did not make the jump from the introduction to the growth phase. Some KM efforts and COPs do survive to the growth phase; however these established communities are not progressing along the life cycle curve due to little or no continual growth in activity levels and early adopters representing the bulk of users. The challenge for established COPs is to not just sustain activity levels but to create value for more users which will thus enhance the COPs' significance to the global organization.This paper discusses the effects of several methods used to progress COPs along the product life cycle, moving users from casual bystanders to active participants in discussion. Specifically, adopting Web 2.0 technology provides new ways to engage users to define value-added content, leverage social networking, and embrace collaboration. In addition to implementing new web-based technologies, a full-time knowledge transfer facilitator or knowledge broker fosters the growth of the community. Lastly, over time established COPs tend to gel around certain employee populations, and the knowledge broker must break these arbitrary barriers and engage other users in the organization such as supply chain management or laboratory personnel. With the combination of these methods, the COPs have been shown to progress along the product life cycle with increased adoption and added value for the organization.
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