Tap into the "Creativity of the Crowd"!

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.

Established Knowledge Management (KM) Communities of Practice: Moving Across the KM Product Life Cycle

Burress

Paylow

2009

Bridging the Gap between Deploying Collaborative Applications and Generating Value

Burress

Paylow

2010

Increasing numbers of collaborative tools and environments are becoming commercially available, and many of these applications are used or have been tried within the oil industry. But simply having the tools doesn't mean they provide value or are embraced by employees. The perceived need for change management or lack of resources dedicated to change management seems to be pervasive across the industry. So this leads to the question: "How can we bridge the gap between deploying IT applications and generating value to users and the organization?" This case study looks at different low-cost approaches employed to prototype uses and builds user familiarity with several collaborative applications within our organization. These applications include webinars, wikis, collaborative discussions, amateur video and Microsoft SharePoint® software functions.Some simple approaches to deploying these tools have driven greater uptake and collaboration in the organization. Others became viral messaging. Other methods just didn't "stick" with users. While not all approaches have been successful, we view this as part of our innovation and learning process.Collaboration is important to organizations and participants as it enables efficiency, effectiveness, knowledge transfer and innovation. The ability to bring people and information together from around the globe is increasingly critical as we watch resources diminish due to the economic climate, the demographics of the industry's workforce change significantly and the technical and commercial challenges to find, drill, and produce hydrocarbons grow more complex. Collaboration between users doesn't happen simply because tools are available. Organizations must find a way to make collaborative tools valuable, wanted and used.

Embedded Knowledge-Management Systems Increase Cost Efficiency of an Organization: A Case Study

Jaripatke

Mcelroy

2010

In the global marketplace, considering the bleak outlook for the economy, successful companies must tailor their business model to continually increase efficiency for proven revenue-generating processes by reducing costs associated within operations, technology, manufacturing, and logistics. Focusing on economics can never be detrimental to health, safety, and operational-efficiency standards, which remain at the forefront for all operations. A knowledgeable and competent workforce is necessary to sustain efficient "cost-savings driven" operations. Knowledge-management systems (KMS) and concepts are tools that integrate divisions or units within a corporation effectively to achieve the business goals and shared vision of the corporation as a whole. Much has been written on the knowledge-management (KM) concept, but most of it discusses in detail only the concept and vision. This paper discusses the KM concept model, challenges, and the successful integration and implementation of KM in a company. This includes where KM communities have been implemented in each major product-service line (PSL) of the company and in support-position job functions where knowledge workers service multiple PSLs. It discusses how the scope of the KM teams has expanded from the original intent to how the KM portals are involved in diverse projects on a daily basis to bring together different ideologies and functionalities within a company to achieve the business objectives discussed above. In addition, it discusses the future vision for KM within a large multinational service company to share and embed collaborative concepts weaved into the fabric of the company by networking people throughout the whole organization. The book on KM within the energy industry is still being written; it is a work in progress, virtual, and the editing is ongoing.