Feature

posted 10 Oct 2005 in Volume 9 Issue 2

Knowledge in action

Using KM lessons learnt to transform business processes at SAIC

By Jerry Ash

A major international science and technology company is currently engaged in a change-management process that will transform the company. Kent Greenes, senior vice president and chief knowledge officer (CKO) at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), was originally hired by SAIC as a rainmaker in the KM consulting market, but now is the lead change-management strategist under the company’s first new CEO since the organisation was founded in 1969.

Although not all the changes will be knowledge-driven, Greenes is drawing on his experiences with KM clients, including British Petroleum (BP) and the US military.

The value proposition of SAIC’s KM portfolio over the past six years has been based on Greenes’s previous experiences at BP and from a growing body of knowledge gained working with clients, not from any formal practice of KM at SAIC itself. Now that same value proposition is being used at SAIC to drive the remake of its own business practices.

This cover story chronicles knowledge gained from client consulting experiences and links those lessons learnt to the transformation strategies now underway at SAIC.

CompanyCommand: Timely knowledge

Greenes’s most treasured lessons come from assignments with the US military. His favourite ‘aha’ comes from a brief paid engagement and an ongoing pro bono relationship with the US Army’s first community of practice (CoP), CompanyCommand.com. CompanyCommand is a grassroots network composed of company commanders, past, present and future, who are engaged in an ongoing conversation about the responsibilities of leading soldiers and building combat-ready units. By engaging in an ongoing conversation centred on the knowledge of company commanders around the world, the group is now producing more effective leaders and frontline units.

The founders of CompanyCommand, Tony Burgess and Nate Allen, met at West Point in 1987 and were commissioned as infantry officers in 1990. Both spent a long time on brigade staff prior to taking command of separate units. During their brigade experiences they observed other commanders and compared notes of both the good and the bad. Once they assumed their own commands, they kept in touch and together thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if commanders could easily share their ideas with like-minded leaders across the Army?”

Until the explosion of the internet, Burgess and Allen had no vehicle to create a seamless community of highly mobile military commanders. When they discovered the internet, CompanyCommand was born and quickly grew to a group of 2,500 company commanders, passing 10,000 last year.

“For many of us,” Burgess says, “CompanyCommand has become professionally the greatest experience of our lives. We naturally spend time reflecting on our experiences and have the desire to both remember them and pass on some of what we have learnt and experienced in the field to others. Those who are preparing to take command naturally would love to tap into the ideas and insights of the thousands who have gone before them.”

Kent Greenes, well known for his development of communities at BP, was asked to coach the new community. Etienne Wenger, Hubert Saint-Onge and Nancy Dixon also have worked with the group. Nancy Dixon co-authored a book with Allen, Burgess and others, CompanyCommand: Unleashing the Power of the Army Profession.

“Other than relationships built while attending West Point or War College, there was no informal way for new company commanders to learn informally from experienced commanders before taking command of troops,” Greenes says.

CompanyCommand was mostly a virtual community until last year when it held its first face-to-face meeting in Washington, D.C. Greenes helped facilitate the session and brought with him deep knowledge. But what he learnt from the audience was just as valuable.

For example, one work session was set up for three commanders who had just returned from Afghanistan to talk to three new commanders who had never commanded before but were about to be deployed to Iraq.

“The three experienced commanders freely shared timeless experiences they thought the inexperienced commanders might need in the environment they were about to enter. They assumed the best knowledge sharing would come from their experiences in the field. The green commanders listened politely until one of the young lieutenants spoke up saying, “This is great stuff and one day I’m going to use it. But right now, I need to know how many mousetraps I need so I can submit a requisition and have them there when we set up camp. I heard cobras follow mice into tents over there.”

“It sounds silly,” Greenes says, “but the powerful lesson was that the most relevant knowledge is timely knowledge. Relationship, trust and conversation are the most critical things needed to inspire the transfer of useful knowledge.”

Lessons like that led Greenes, Allen, Burgess and Dixon to create a different model for organising useful community networks. “A community requires content, context and conversation,” Greenes says. “All three are required to make knowledge networking useful.”

Beyond sales; wanting to do more

Dozens of other lessons learnt are providing the components of the knowledge-enabled transformation initiative at SAIC under the leadership of Greenes. He succeeded in developing a KM consulting business for SAIC that earned good returns for the company – first in the oil business and then expanding into other commercial industries.

“My eyes were wide open when I took the consulting job in 1999,” Greenes recalls. “I was brought in primarily to leverage my reputation in KM in the commercial and international marketplace in order to win business and help grow the company. It was pretty clear to me that internal KM was secondary and I was being hired to add KM to SAIC’s core competencies so our various offers to the research and engineering world would be more distinctive. BP was SAIC’s biggest commercial client and generated a significant portion of SAIC’s commercial revenues. I would help them expand that reach.”

That reach has extended to include clients who have ‘taught the teacher’ – Amerada Hess Joint Venture in Algeria, Northcom BPR, US Army CECOM, Defence Ammunition Center, Seventh Fleet of the US Navy, Naval District of Washington, Saudi Aramco, Unocal and British American Tobacco, among others.

The arrival of a new CEO at SAIC and his future plans to grow the company presented a unique opportunity and Greenes seized it.

“After the new CEO had settled into his office, I went to him and asked if he wanted me to continue making money by selling KM services to clients or did he want me to help the company with its transformation initiatives. He knew of my experience in organisational transformation and gave me the chance to do it for SAIC.”

In late 2004, Greenes handed over the KM consulting business to a person he had groomed for the job and immediately set about his new job of company transformation, still carrying the title of CKO as well as senior vice president. Integral to that transformation would be the KM lessons learnt from and with his external clients. But the purpose for integrating KM into the transformation would not be idealistic. It would be pragmatic. As with every change, the goal for KM would be to apply its strategies, principles and procedures. SAIC has been a good performing company, improving every year for more than 36 years. But to be high performing is a much bigger challenge and to meet the challenge the organisation will have to leverage all the knowledge it has, creates or discovers.

As with the CompanyCommand experience, Greenes has learnt several fundamental lessons from clients over the past decade that he is now using while leading SAIC’s transformation. Here are just a few:

Action reviews: Hope is not a method

Of all the lessons learnt from oil fields to government agencies, Kent Greenes loves returning to the US military for KM stimulation. One of his favourite books is titled HOPE is not a METHOD, written by former US Army Chief of Staff Gordon R. Sullivan and Michael V. Harper. It presents a programme for change that provides lessons and tactics that all business people can benefit from. Greenes regards Sullivan as the “father of KM in the Army”.

One of Greenes’s earliest accomplishments came from learning how the Army conducts after-action reviews (AARs). Greenes took that method into British Petroleum, to oil platforms, chemical plants and refineries. However, he removed the word ‘After’ and adopted a practice of on-the-spot action reviews (ARs). When people resisted he opined,

“If soldiers can learn while they’re getting shot at, then workers can take 15 minutes in an environment that is demanding but yet nowhere near as intense as the battlefield.”

An AR is ‘learning in the moment’, not after, and became one of the primary learning tools at BP. It is becoming a cornerstone of SAIC’s transformation projects.

Learn fast and perform at the speed of change

Another of Greenes’s favourite lessons learnt came from an opportunity to meet with one of the Air Force generals setting up a command organisation. He saw it not only as a prospective contract but an opportunity to – in some small way – help prepare and protect the country from further terrorist attacks. “We would pull all the stops to make it happen,” Greenes says.

The joint force structure resource and assessment officer (J8) who was responsible for management of all resources, planning and budgeting for the command organisation was involved in the conversation. Since this organisation would be the first joint command set up for protecting the US mainland, the J8 knew existing allocation processes would not be exactly what his operation needed to be effective.

He saw the possibility of applying the fast-learning processes of SAIC to accelerate the re-engineering of resource allocation for the command. Speed was critical to get ahead of the annual planning cycle.

“We scoped and delivered a project to weave learning before, during and after into a traditional BPR approach to design a command-resource-allocation process. Essentially, we were re-engineering and designing the new process on the fly, but with fast learning from the actual execution of each step of the new process to build in improvement along the way. In six months, in collaboration with the J8 and his team, the new, fit-for-purpose process was delivered. The original BPR estimate was 12 months. This was particularly important in the command structure where short-term military workforce rotation combined with a longer-term civilian workforce creates a significant knowledge-retention challenge. All the more reason to be able to learn fast from those that will only be on the team for a short time,” says Greenes.

Learning on the fly is coming in handy during the SAIC transformation. “We had never used Six Sigma internally at SAIC,” Greenes says. “To help us move quickly up the learning curve, we integrated the fast-learning processes into both the Six Sigma service-improvement methodology and into our actual execution of the methodology on projects. In this way, we have been able to accelerate building of our competency to apply Six Sigma as well as the delivery of performance-improvement results to our business.”

Meet ‘em where they’re at

One of Greenes’s most powerful early experiences in KM came from a request for help by a BP offshore installation manager on the Forties Charlie Platform in the North Sea.

His platform was not meeting oil-production targets and he was aware of some success BP was having with KM in improving compressor uptime in Colombia. “I remember arriving on the platform via helicopter in some pretty strong winds and being shuffled off immediately to meet with the maintenance workers. I presented some examples of how things like peer assists and retrospects had created a step-change in the operations performance of several other BP production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. I played a video I made of supervisor and engineer testimonials but it didn’t take me long to see I wasn’t getting their attention.”

Greenes bluntly asked why. His audience explained their problem was unplanned shutdowns, which meant they had to keep turning the wells on and off. Since oil wells don’t turn on and off like water faucets, it was impossible for the crew to think about improving performance when they couldn’t even keep the plant running.

“Their attention was on one thing and I was asking them to focus on something else. We shifted gears and learnt that most of the shutdowns occurred after handover from one work shift to another. So, I facilitated some action reviews with the teams coming off shift and those going on.” The problem was identified, teams made immediate improvements, unplanned shutdowns decreased greatly over the next week and production increased back to target.

“When it came to initiating change at SAIC, I knew we had to focus on where today’s pain was, not where we wanted the company to be,” says Greenes. “That was how we selected the first projects to begin our transformation journey. We targeted improvements to reduce the time to fill open positions for direct contract work and increase positive cash flow by reducing the cycle time to process subcontractor invoices. These were projects that met SAIC businesses and employees where they were at.”

People closest to the work know best

A two-hour presentation on the benefits and application of KM to the senior leadership at Amerada Hess resonated with CEO John Hess.

“He immediately knew right where we should focus our efforts and mandated his exploration and production drilling leaders adopt the KM practices I was offering,” says Greene.

Thrilled as Greenes was, he was worried about too strong a top-down push. He convinced the leadership team to allow him to engage the business leaders further down in the organisation to gain their ownership and buy in. “As long as I delivered the right ROI, that was fine by them,” Greenes recalls.

“The internal KM leader knew some business leaders with major drilling challenges. One was the leader of a new joint venture (JV) in Algeria. It was a ‘brownfield’, an oil and gas field that had been mothballed for many years and the JV was set up to bring the field back to life and commercial production. This was something Amerada Hess had never done before, and the business leader saw how the fast-learning techniques from BP could make a difference. Overnight, we explored the specific challenges the JV had for drilling production wells in the Sahara field. Based on current drilling-performance metrics, we developed cost-and-production improvement targets the business leader felt were realistic. We took the project to the executive leadership team for approval and they agreed.”

But when they arrived in the desert the project changed dramatically. The drilling manager didn’t want help improving the actual drilling process. His ‘pain’ was the length of time it was taking to move drilling rigs from well to well. “We re-estimated the ROI and it was actually a bit higher than what we ‘sold’ the executives,” Greenes recalls. The consulting team changed gears to embrace the needs of the frontline manger, executives were pleased and the KM programme at Amerada Hess was off and running.

At SAIC Greenes applied the Amerada experience to identify the first projects to transform the performance of SAIC.

“We performed a fairly rigorous gap analysis between where we wanted to be in the future and where we were at the time. We engaged the majority of business leaders from top to bottom and ten per cent of the employee population. The final criteria for project selection were business impact and timing, business advocacy, transferability and reach, and feasibility. One of the projects we selected from this process was the business cash flow process.

Not only would this meet a current improvement need, but it was a ‘high nail’ for the new CEO.”

However, Greenes and his team soon realised the project was much too big to tackle and deliver meaningful results in four to six months. So they met with the functional leaders and explored where they felt cash-flow improvements could be made. The head of the procurement function raised the possibility of reducing the cycle time to process subcontractor invoices. He estimated that improvement of several days processing time would increase cash flow by millions of dollars.

“We’ve just completed the project in less than six months and the result is in the tens of millions of dollars of positive cash-flow improvement,” Greenes says. “The procurement people closest to the work knew right where the pain and gain was.”

Build competency through delivery

At Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, US, CECOM (communications and electronics command) hired SAIC to retain knowledge from an aging workforce. “We told the executives we could do that, but suggested not waiting until existing knowledge was leaving,” Greenes recalls. “Our proposal was to approach the problem through a process of training incoming staff by matching them with short timers on projects currently underway. Rather than ‘capture’ knowledge by asking departing workers to give it up, we helped novices learn fast, and harvested both existing and new knowledge while executing improvement projects with mature knowledge workers.”

For example, CECOM needed to improve source selection for the bidding of acquisition contracts. Knowledge retention was an issue, but the more immediate problem was speeding up source selection for contracts. By engaging the old hands and the new blood in solving the problem, aging staff shared what they knew and incoming staff experienced real-time learning while delivering a valuable project. Not only had the process of source selection been improved, but new people also benefited from very relevant knowledge exchange. The CECOM team won a US Army knowledge award for the project and the new process was embedded in the way the new people did their jobs. “When KM practices become part of a routine cycle, a company no longer needs to worry about ‘lost knowledge,’” Greenes says.

Similar experiences at Unocal and DAC (the Defense Ammunition Center at McAlister, Oklahoma) have reinforced the value of this approach. Continuous learning has become a core principle at SAIC. “We are training and building Six Sigma competency out in our business functions and in the line so that the people own it and the processes are internalised. We do very little formal training. We co-deliver the projects and provide just-in-time training of Six Sigma, Lean and Workout methods. At first, new people shadow the Six Sigma Green and Black Belts. Then a transition occurs and the new people take on more responsibility. Finally, old hands are shadowing the newly minted knowledge workers.” By the time aging workers depart, there is no such thing as ‘departing knowledge’. Old and new knowledge are embedded in the heads of their successors.

Harness the power of learning

Learning before, during and after projects improves performance because the results are tangible and immediate. With its clients, SAIC has delivered a three-part methodology:

1. Learn fast, improve now;

2. Tap collective know-how through communities of practice (CoP);

3. Capture knowledge in action.

Based on client experience, however, Greenes doesn’t see knowledge capture as seizing it and codifying it in a document repository. “We have learnt to harvest personal and group experience and insight in a very rich way, actually enabling people to share their stories. When I say ‘capture’ I believe what we are trying to do is capture the knowledge of a person in the way they want it to be heard, not the way we might want to put a spin on it. Knowledge is uniquely an individual’s knowledge and I think it is wrong to attach any bias whatsoever to what the person has experienced.”

To enable storytelling, SAIC encourages people to relate their stories and thoughts on video and audio and then publishes some of the stories in written form for those who would rather read it; but still in the same personal conversational format. And even though each ‘capture’ retains an individual flavour, multiple voices are collected that often reinforce each other with repeated experiences. “I think the term knowledge re-use is misleading,” says Greenes. “KM is about knowledge adoption and adaption. It is pretty rare that someone would have such similar context and need that they would actually use the exact same lesson or good practice gleaned from someone else’s experience.”

The best story on the success of learning, sharing and capturing came in a situation at Cooks Inlet in Alaska where Unocal workers were having doubts about installing electrical submersive pumps (ESPs) for the first time. Other Unocal workers around the globe had deep experience with the pumps, most significantly in Norway.

ESP practitioners were brought together from across the world for some ‘learning before doing’ before the first Cook Inlet ESPs were to be installed. These weren’t executives. These were burly maintenance workers in greasy overalls and engineers from field offices who worked 12 hours on and 12 off in two-week rotations. In one eight-hour period, these peers developed an improvement plan for the ESP solution that would have normally taken a week to accomplish. Not only did the Alaskan engineers learn, but visiting engineers learnt the power of peer assists. They got to know each other. They wanted to keep sharing, and it kick-started the formation of an ESP community of practice.

With the help of the SAIC KM consultants, the ESP practitioners captured and codified what the company knew about ESP and a knowledge asset was created by the community with a sense of personal belief and ownership. “It has become a really powerful knowledge app,” Greenes says. Engineers go to the website to get the latest know-how and experience and if it isn’t there, they can at least find out who they can talk to. The content stimulates conversation between community members, even those that have never met before. The asset itself provides a common context for meaningful exchange of knowledge.

You can be certain that the internal transformation of SAIC will harness the power of learning, sharing, capturing and renewing individual knowledge as an integral part of the way people work.

Results facilitate change

All these experiences have one thing in common – they produced results that changed the performance of people, teams and the enterprise.

“To this day, I don’t think there is anything that changes people like results,” Greenes says. “People are understandably uncomfortable with change,” he says, “but when you show them a better result, you get them thinking about the possibility of doing something different. You can do a lot of stuff in change management by helping people see the possibilities. The key is to deliver meaningful and manageable results in short periods of time so people can see the reason for change.”

That’s the personal mantra Kent Greenes carries with him now as he carries out the transformation of SAIC to reach the standards achieved by his own clients before him. His clients have provided powerful influences. They have been the consultant’s consultant.

References

1. CompanyCommand: http://companycommand.army.mil/ev_en.php?ID=1_201&ID2=DO_ROOT

2. CompanyCommand: Unleashing the Power of the Army Profession, Nancy Dixon, Nate Allen, Nancy Dixon, Tony Burgess, Pete Kilner and Steve Schweitzer (http://www.kwork.org/Store/featured.html)

3. SAIC: http://www.saic.com/km/

Jerry Ash is a special correspondent for Inside Knowledge and founder of the Association of Knowledgework http://www.kwork.org He can be contacted at jash@kwork.org