It’s been a while since we heard the words ‘knowledge management’ (KM) so it was refreshing to read through Cecily O’Neill’s (Velrada) presentation on social collaboration and next generation information management, given at the Quest Smart E&P conference in Perth, Australia last month.
Velrada is an IT consultancy and integrator
that has worked on information management on major capital projects in
Australia’s mining and energy verticals. O’Neill’s KM poster children
include Rio Tinto, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell. These companies
have ‘fundamentally changed’ their approach to knowledge management for
capital project development from a focus based entirely on engineering
terms and tangible inputs, to look at how organizational learning can
increase efficiency and reduce risk.
O’Neill presented two
‘real world’ case studies. ConocoPhillips now has some 100 knowledge
networks and a ‘business 2.0’ approach with collaborative jams,
visioning strategy sessions and ‘Wikithons,’ enabled by Oracle’s ConText
search tool. The result was ‘purposeful collaboration’ across global
functions, disciplines and networks that helped employees handle
situations that do not fit into established processes and structures.
Shell’s
solution leverages SharePoint, MatchPoint, TRIM, Project Server and
Power Pivot and is integrated with SAP and business process modelling
applications.
O’Neill told Oil IT Journal, ‘KM is definitely
making a comeback now that we have the technology to enable the capture
and management of tacit information and tools to support collaboration,
but it is not just about the technology. We also see organizations in
our region looking at ways to unlock the productivity benefits and to
make it easier to on-board projects and teams. It is a very different
approach to previous incarnations of KM and is definitely driven out of
competitive demand.’
More from Quest.
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