Conoco Report Essay

Last hebdomad I attended Forresters Content & Collaboration Forum 2011. Forrester notes that in five years, al well-nigh half(prenominal) of US workers about 63 million people lead work virtu tout ensembley. I am already one of them. This will change everything in workplace IT support from designing workplace information strategies for collaboration, to delivering heart and soul experiences tothe firm. For this international, integrated energy company with thousands of job sites (often quite remote) spread across 30 countries, the challenge of manduction familiarity was very real and the potential payoff was large. Facing fierce competition on all fronts, ConocoPhillips knew that to continue on its success trajectory, it needed to rapidly and effectively harness the know directge of its highly skillful but geographically distributed workforce. Instead of assuming that technology either was the solution or was irrelevant when creating online communities, old managers underst ood that effective global communities required new processes, roles, cultures, and technologies.Moreover, they recognized that severally had to be focused on solving difficult logical argument challenges. Seven years later, the ConocoPhillips know directge- manduction program is puted as best-in-class across industries. Dan mentioned that Conoco Phillips is quaternate largest traded company in US with 30,000 employees around the world and many contractors who also participate in their knowledge sharing. They have been many changes in the last 12 years as a number of companies were acquired, along with the merger of Conoco and Phillips. This activity has triggered a big need for knowledge sharing. He likes the term knowledge sharing rather than knowledge management. I completely agree. Dan utter it is about getting people to lecturing to each other. Trust is important for this.They are now going to reorganize and the solid state of their knowledge assets will help with this c ausal agent. Dan tell that more than 70% of their good ideas have come from their employees. Good things happen when employees talk to each other. Dan said that his boss is the SVP of Planning and Strategy and he reports to the CEO so people find out to him as where you sit in the org chart matters within his firm. I think this is true for most firms. The most successful KM efforts I have seen all have a senior sponsor of rank and respect in the organization. Most KM groups are placed too far down the pecking order to be effective. Their KM effort started when a senior executive felt they were re-inventing things too much. The focus was ever so connecting people more than collectingdocuments. They grew by sharing success stories. manduction these success stories was connected to their shifting compensation plan and this really triggered response.They started the Archimedes Awards to knowledge sharing. Categories are Give, Grab, Gather, and Guts. Dan gave some examples about s afety improvements that also led to big financial returns. They have documented over 9 billion dollars in gains through the program. Dan said that they have functional excellence models that give specifics for improvements. They promote purposeful collaboration. Dan said serendipity can be helpful at times but being purposeful works best in their firm. He said that knowledge accumulates in networks and their firm has a matrix organization. Leadership behavior is important for knowledge to liquify and manager support for knowledge sharing is critical. They now have 150 networks of excellence. The first few were launched in 2005.They had 20 by the end of the year. These networks were built on trust and relationships, not technology. Prior efforts failed because they were technology focused. He showed an example covering upstream rotating equipment. A big problem is lost production opportunity. There is a group that addresses this fuck to keep equipment running safely. Networks are open to all employees, not just group members. Related networks are connected because issues are related across networks. Their bring and Discuss component has led to 100,000 exchanges. He does not believe in formal lessons learned. It takes too much time. Informal connections work better.I would agree and add the formal lessons learned become out of date very quickly and public lecture with people gives the most current ideas. People want to help each other but they also want answers quickly. Dan showed a diagram of all the cross-connections. They are massive. Knowledge silos do not seem to an issue for them. They have three main tools Ask and Discuss, Knowledge Library, and One Wiki.The wiki is the first place to look for content. Ask and Discuss was covered above. All of their success stories have an economic impact. One had 87 million dollars of benefits. Sharing this is important. Giving credit to the employees is critical. Getting middle managers on board was done through co nveying business value of knowledge sharing. It was fun for me to hear about a successful knowledge management effort as I used to be involved with many in the 90s and early 2000s.