denotes premium content | Dec 2 2008 Feature
posted 1 Oct 1999 in Volume 3 Issue 2
Mapping & tracking K
In this case study,
Rachel Deakin and Ken Pratt describe BG Technology's three generation model of
knowledge management. A varied choice of methods, from knowledge banking and
Communites of Practice to intranet usage and document management track and
provide intuitive grid references to company knowledge.
These supports increase efficiency
and effectiveness ('doing things better') and map a path towards an innovative
future ('doing better things').
This case study explores the approach
of BG Technology in applying knowledge management principles, technologies and
tools to achieve benefits both operationally and strategically. These are
described within a three generation model for managing knowledge and insight,
namely:
Teams & Communities
Knowledge Discovery
Business
Transformation
As
an introduction to the drivers for this work it is helpful to understand the
recent history and current organisation of the BG group and of BG Technology. BG
Plc is a leading international energy company that is actively developing and
supplying gas markets in around twenty countries across the globe. Formed in
February 1997 as a result of the demerger of British Gas, the group has three
main business units:
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Transco, the major distributor of gas in the UK |
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BG International, responsible for international oil and gas exploration and production activities, including the development and marketing of upstream and downstream energy products |
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Corporate Development, responsible for leading the identification and creation of new sources of shareholder value throughout the BG Group. |
BG Technology, a part of Corporate Development, is responsible for providing research and technology to all BG business units and an increasing range of external customers. We work at the leading edge of technologies across the whole of the gas chain and have thousands of man-years of experience in exploration, production, transmission, distribution, storage and energy utilisation, as well as in setting standards for safety and environmental issues.
During the transformation of BG from the nationalised UK gas industry to a leading international energy company, the need to include knowledge management at the heart of its operations became apparent because of two key changes:
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The need to be competitive in a cost conscious, high technology international market meant leveraging knowledge from one part of the business to another and increasing innovation |
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The major reduction in staff numbers and associated skill loss meant we had to find ways of retaining and reusing our accumulated knowledge in the face of staff mobility. |
Both these drivers are as relevant to BG Technology as to BG Plc as a whole and they are the major reason that we became active in the area of practical knowledge management in 1997. Our work so far and our plans for the future are described below, along with our experiences of achieving tangible business benefits by applying knowledge solutions.
Within this paper we will often refer to knowledge, information and data interchangeably. This is because the distinction is only relevant when an item is used or reused and not when it is created or 'managed'. It is not possible to fully pre-judge the future uses of an item and hence its value. So, providing the cost of managing it and retrieving it in the future is low then, in our view, it should be recorded.
First generation KM - teams & communities
Providing technology solutions and good practice advice that enable teams and communities to share their knowledge is a simple, highly productive and popular starting point. Doing so with the additional goal of exploiting that knowledge outside the team, both during and beyond its lifetime, greatly increases the potential benefits. We have taken this approach throughout our work.
Teams and communities have different characteristics and dynamics and their knowledge therefore needs managing differently. We see a team as a group of people with common goals but not necessarily common interests, for example a project team. Teams usually have a set lifetime and then disband. Communities, on the other hand, have common interests but few if any common goals, for example a group of chemists. They remain active for a very long time. In order to achieve their common goal a team has to share its knowledge, but, without a common goal, there is no need for a community to share. This makes it harder to get community based initiatives up and running. One basic consideration applies to both though: few people will work effectively with a knowledge sharing system unless they benefit personally and unless minimal or zero additional effort is needed. BG initiatives in first generation knowledge management include:
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The collection, storage and delivery of knowledge for local and global teams |
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Sharing best practice case studies and ideas within dispersed communities. |
Teams
There are multiple and overlapping teams throughout BG. The company's intranet KITE (Knowledge and Information To Everyone) is now available on 16,500 desktops worldwide to meet their high-level information requirements, and has been developed as a managed solution with Lotus Notes/Domino. This transportable application is called MaiNS (Managed Intranet Solution), and offers features such as distributed publishing, control of document authorisation, audit trail, hit monitoring and an integrated search engine. It solves the problem of having a large number of active distributed information publishers whilst still retaining control of content, ownership and currency. MaiNS is now being applied to other intranets in BG and has been made available to external companies. MaiNS was recently awarded the Cranfield Intranet Oscar as the best intranet for 1999.
The intranet has been structured so that a user can drill down fully through the various team hierarchies in order to gain an overview of the purpose, activities and skills of each team and team member. Creating such team information is an additional task. It is made available specifically to provide additional insights into team activities and possible interconnections, and is just the tip of the iceberg of all the knowledge produced and recorded within the organisation. Other knowledge produced has much narrower objectives. Each team within BG Technology can collect this content within a team database application, which we envisage as the team's filing cabinet. The documents placed in these databases are produced as part of the team's normal operations. This simple and quick to use application provides significant benefits for the team in terms of finding and reusing information. It also helps us as an organisation to retain and restructure our knowledge base when projects are complete or teams are restructured. Users currently have full control over who within the company can read or edit the documents they place in these team databases and, to make things simple, the three most commonly read access options are presented as check boxes - keep-it-private, publish-to-team and publish-to-intranet. A workflow approvals process is applied whenever the last option is selected.
Teams
There are multiple and overlapping teams throughout BG. The company's intranet KITE (Knowledge and Information To Everyone) is now available on 16,500 desktops worldwide to meet their high-level information requirements, and has been developed as a managed solution with Lotus Notes/Domino. This transportable application is called MaiNS (Managed Intranet Solution), and offers features such as distributed publishing, control of document authorisation, audit trail, hit monitoring and an integrated search engine. It solves the problem of having a large number of active distributed information publishers whilst still retaining control of content, ownership and currency. MaiNS is now being applied to other intranets in BG and has been made available to external companies. MaiNS was recently awarded the Cranfield Intranet Oscar as the best intranet for 1999.
The intranet has been structured so that a user can drill down fully through the various team hierarchies in order to gain an overview of the purpose, activities and skills of each team and team member. Creating such team information is an additional task. It is made available specifically to provide additional insights into team activities and possible interconnections, and is just the tip of the iceberg of all the knowledge produced and recorded within the organisation. Other knowledge produced has much narrower objectives. Each team within BG Technology can collect this content within a team database application, which we envisage as the team's filing cabinet. The documents placed in these databases are produced as part of the team's normal operations. This simple and quick to use application provides significant benefits for the team in terms of finding and reusing information. It also helps us as an organisation to retain and restructure our knowledge base when projects are complete or teams are restructured. Users currently have full control over who within the company can read or edit the documents they place in these team databases and, to make things simple, the three most commonly read access options are presented as check boxes - keep-it-private, publish-to-team and publish-to-intranet. A workflow approvals process is applied whenever the last option is selected.
Team documents can also be made easily available to all 16,500 BG employees as all the team databases are linked through the team's intranet pages. A 'log-on' button is available when viewing the database via the intranet, letting anyone, anywhere, identify himself or herself securely and then see any document they are entitled to see.
Significant benefits have already been gained by utilising these team databases. There have been efficiency gains, with less 'reinventing the wheel' and improved communications within the wider team, including internal customers. Also increased effectiveness in both better decision making and new business have been in evidence. For example:
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An analysis of the hand-held computer market produced for one part of the business was picked up and used by another group. Previously a separate analysis would have been commissioned. |
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A business development manager was able to give an unplanned detailed presentation on the work of BG Technology on natural gas vehicles to a potential client in the Far East with no notice. Previously this would have not been possible and would have been a lost business opportunity. |
Global Teams
After a request by BG International, BG Technology has recently created a solution to support their global teams. Such teams are much harder to support with team members being dispersed around the world, spending a lot of time travelling and rarely meeting. We have now developed a suite of tools that gives this type of team several key knowledge sharing components. This enables team members to work effectively together whilst being apart and, importantly, to work offline.
These components contain live team documentation (such as project plans and contacts) as well as common information sets such as legal contracts, political and economic reports and wider corporate contacts. They can also contain live input from electronic newsfeeds or journals such as FT Energy. One of the major advantages of this global team system is being able to search simultaneously across all these internal and external information components, even in an aeroplane! Users also know they are dealing with the latest information, and that their colleagues have an identical set.
Again, significant efficiency and effectiveness benefits are being made using such systems. Face to face meetings can now be used for discussing issues, not getting up to date with progress. Greater value is being obtained from external information by storing it at publication, and then being able to retrieve it when it becomes relevant.
Communities
Communities are supported by systems from other parts of BG in the form of cross business unit forums. These forums let selected communities develop and share best practice and case studies, discuss new ideas, lessons learnt and best practice, leveraging their knowledge across the entire organisation. We have now created forums for generic communities such as safety and environment, regulation and procurement across all BG's businesses. Interaction within the forums is via a web browser so that forum members can operate from anywhere in the company via the intranet.
An example of a successfully deployed community is that for regulation, where lessons learnt dealing with a regulator in one part of the world are being applied elsewhere. Previously this would have only happened by chance.
Key first generation lessons
The following points summarise the key lessons learnt from our work on first generation knowledge management:
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Information Ownership - Ensure this is clear for each component at all levels |
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Teams & Communities pose very different cultural and technical knowledge sharing problems |
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A Knowledge Creation process that controls distributed content and feeds it easily and directly into the system is essential. |
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Simple and flexible (technology) solutions are the only ones that encourage wide use, particularly from technophobes. |
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Information Ownership - Ensure this is clear for each component at all levels |
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Teams & Communities pose very different cultural and technical knowledge sharing problems |
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A Knowledge Creation process that controls distributed content and feeds it easily and directly into the system is essential. |
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Simple and flexible (technology) solutions are the only ones that encourage wide use, particularly from technophobes. |
Second Generation KM - Knowledge Discovery
We consider second generation knowledge management to be about knowledge discovery - each user being able to find out what other people in the company know. BG Technology's major work in this area has been to develop a Technology Knowledge Bank, together with a mechanism for intelligently finding the knowledge required from within it. The analogy of a bank has proved very powerful in communicating our concepts, representing both value and security.
There are several components to the Technology Bank:
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Project Documents - Items produced by project teams as part of their project work |
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Project Archive - Past project documents |
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Published Reports - More than 100,000 scanned and indexed pages from more that six years' proprietary research |
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Specialist Databases - On specific technologies produced for BG customers |
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Competitor Intelligence - Collated information on our competitors |
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Skills & Contacts - Each employee owns their own key skills and experience profiles. |
Withdrawing knowledge from the Technology Bank is simple. All the user
needs is a web browser, a user name and a password. Again the bank analogy works
if we think about an ATM machine. The Technology Bank can be accessed in two
ways, by navigating through a hierarchy or by searching. Both are accommodated
through a common interface. However, the former is only really applicable if you
are 'withdrawing' something that you know exists and for which you know its
location. The real power comes in the form of full text, concept-based
searching, working simultaneously across the bank and other stores such as our
intranet, external news feeds and targeted web sites. This is achieved using
Excalibur Technologies' RetrievalWare(tm) product, which we selected using five
key criteria:
| 1 | Its ability to search in parallel across a wide variety of information sources, with particular emphasis on Lotus Notes, scanned paper, WWW, relational databases and native file systems |
| 2 | Its ability to honour document level security, particularly for Lotus Notes |
| 3 | Its advanced search features. These go beyond basic keyword concepts and, most importantly, enable the retrieval and ranking of the documents that most closely match the meaning of the query rather than just the words |
| 4 | Its scalability, potentially up to 100-1000Gb |
| 5 | Its accuracy and speed |
BG Technology has worked closely with
Excalibur to ensure their product meets the requirements for knowledge discovery
within a major international corporate such as BG. A formal working partnership
between the two parties was recently announced. RetrievalWare(tm) is also used
as the search engine on KITE, our company intranet, and both this and the
Technology Bank application use our own proprietary user interfaces.
The best way of
illustrating the power of this system is through real life examples, such as
finding the right person to answer your problem, or finding and giving a
presentation to a client at a moment's notice. One of the most powerful cases
emerged when we were demonstrating the system to a group of BG pipeline
engineers. One of them challenged us to search for "Great Crested Newts". This
type of newt is an endangered species and, if they are found near an engineering
site, our work has to stop, with the potential to incur very large costs.
Everyone was surprised (especially us!) with the top two hits returned. The
first hit was an article from an issue of our internal BG magazine, published on
the intranet, about an employee who had actually gained a 'newt handling
licence', which lawfully allows him to move and re-house newts! The second hit
was a BG Technology internal report on a site visit in 1995, when newts were
encountered. This report even provided the Latin name for this newt, Triturus
Cristatus. Also we were initially somewhat confused by several further documents
being returned concerning a project called Triton, however this shows the power
of the RetrievalWare search because apparently newts are called tritons in the
USA. In a real life scenario putting a project manager in contact with our own
'newt handler' at a time when an ongoing pipeline project is about to be
delayed, could save the equivalent cost of developing the bank and purchasing
the search engine in a few days.
Another example of a successful use of
the bank was at the start up of a new project in BG Technology. The newly
appointed project leader was quickly able to identify key legacy information,
related projects and technical experts. This saved considerable time and effort,
as well as helping to ensure a sound basis for the project.
The future success of BG will depend
in part, upon the effective exploitation of its technology base. With the
solutions described in this paper, BG Technology is already demonstrating that
knowledge sharing, using state-of-the-art information systems, can easily make
invaluable insights available at any time to BG's business anywhere in the
world. Our approach to knowledge sharing can be applied much more widely, with
the Technology Bank being seen as just one branch of a wider BG and/or partner
'banking network'.
Key second generation lessons
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'Knowing who knows' is the easiest place to start, putting people in contact, to benefit both them and the business |
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Move on to 'knowing what they know' by making knowledge available across the company so that it can be found very simply |
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Employ as intelligent a search engine as possible so as to get over the limitations of finding information by navigation and categorisation |
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Retain the trust of information owners by ensuring that all access methods, including searching, honour their |
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security requirements |
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Never underestimate the power of serendipity, exploring knowledge you didn't know you needed to know often generates useable ideas. |
Third generation KM - Business Transformation
Our third generation knowledge management is all about 'doing better things', transforming the business rather than just increasing efficiency and moving forward in a straight line. BG Technology is now working in partnership with a team of futures consultants, The Prophet Centre, to bring this vision to reality.
We have recently produced a technology and process platform that combines the approaches and technologies deployed in the work described above with advanced content capture, management and regeneration tools such as text mining, knowledge landscaping and cultural change. The platform will allow knowledge workers such as strategy analysts to exploit a company's total knowledge resources in helping to make their decisions about the future business more accurate and timely. The approach is illustrated in Figure 5, with dynamic, themed knowledge bases being maintained from a multiplicity of content sources. The user interacts with this knowledge base directly or through a toolbox, including intelligent search, text mining (data mining with information extraction) and knowledge landscaping (using the Themescape(tm) product from Cartia Inc).
The platform will operate on a reciprocal or 'give-to-get' basis, drawing further knowledge from the user as they look at the contents of the knowledge base, including the actual and perceived 'values' they attach to any information they access. Business transformation will start to occur when knowledge bases and operating teams start to function across different businesses who are prepared to work together to achieve specific business objectives.
Our conclusions so far?
In order to support increasing demands from the market place and to counteract the loss of knowledge and skills from reduced staff numbers, BG Technology has embraced and successfully integrated a variety of knowledge management practices and technologies. We have learned a lot of lessons in selecting and applying these technologies for our own business and we are now looking to make that learning available to other organisations. Our three-generation model has let us establish clearly our knowledge management roadmap. The first two generations focusing on 'doing things better', i.e. increasing efficiency and effectiveness, whilst the third is about 'doing better things', - achieving real business innovation with partners.
In this paper we have tried to give a flavour of our work over the last two years and the direction we are now heading. It is a long journey that has only just begun, but one where we know that the travelling and the exploration along the way will be both exciting and beneficial.
Rachel Deakin is a Lotus Notes developer in Applied Knowledge Solutions at BG Technology who has designed and developed many of the applications described above. She can be contacted at:rachel.deakin@bgtech.co.uk
Ken Pratt is a project manager in Applied Knowledge Solutions at BG Technology who has led many of the above projects during the last two years. He can be contacted at:ken.pratt@bgtech.co.uk
Applied Knowledge Solutions is a business within BG Technology with expertise in Business Analysis, Financial Engineering, Mobile Computing and KM. For further information contact Martin Vasey, General Manager of Applied Knowledge Solutions at:martin.vasey@bgtech.co.uk
