BEEP Examples
August 23, 2002

BP Connect

Type and use of ICT

The basic application for the Connect project is the personalised websites, with search facilities. The implementation of this application was helped greatly by an infrastructure of common machines and versions of software networked across the globe: the COE, or common operating environment. This is done across the whole company, concerning the full 100,000 employees. The cost of doing this was €. 320 million. The network can be used from all companies, homes and laptops. So, employees can use their e-mail, retrieve documents, enter online discussions, find experts, anywhere, anytime.

Background

BP is a multinational company of 100,000 people involved in oil, gas and power generation. The company has locations in over 100 countries around the world and is divided into 150 businesses.

Sir John Browne, head of the company, believes that sharing what BP employees know will help improving the business performance. Especially after the merger with Amoco, there was the need to stimulate collaboration among expertise. In order to facilitate knowledge exchange within BP, several Knowledge Management practices are implemented:

  1. A holistic learning model on learning before, during and after work is done.
  2. Creating a common operating environment for knowledge exchange through peer assists.
  3. BP Connect: internal Yellow Pages for finding BP experts.
  4. Community building: connecting people with common interests (communities of interest), bringing them together to exchange know how (communities of practice) or work as a team (communities of commitment)
  5. Capturing knowledge: gathering and storing common practices distinguish good practices and make this knowledge accessible for all BP employees.

In the end, these policy measures need to resolve in a different way of working, in which knowledge management plays an unconscious part, enhancing the productivity of BP. Two practices are described within BeEP. This case study is focussed on Connect.

Objectives

The objective of the BP Connect project is to create an environment where all employees can find the right expert and prevent the wheel from being reinvented through a ten-minute phone.

Resources (apart from ICT)

To built Connect a team was assigned, using about 3 FTE. To maintain Connect a separate contract is set up, using less than 1 FTE.

Activities

BP Amoco Connect is a searchable Intranet repository, which serves as internal Yellow Pages for finding BP experts. Employees present themselves on their personal web page, displaying their professional skills, relevant experiences, interests and other personal background. The site contains items like: name, job title, team business unit, structures taxonomy of ‘areas of expertise’, languages spoken, internal and external contacts, favourite web links, uploaded photographs, cv, audio clip, network memberships and contact information. Employees also have a free text area and the listed categories of expertise are ever evolving.

Connect was started up with a pilot of 500 upsteam technology staff. During its initial phase, the design was kept open enough to easily encompass the entire organisations. After this pilot, focus groups were held to enhance the interface. The number of users grew rapidly to 10,000 employees in the first year. An awareness campaign was set up, mounted by a group of heavy users. Surely, when chairman Brown also opened a personal page this contributed to the popularity of Connect.

Through its very openness to maintain ones own site, people include interesting links to other sites and networks. A user surfing Connect can move from individual to network, to staff with similar expertise, to a favourite external contact. Most significant of all, by providing all staff with their own URL, Connect acts as a unique layer upon which a knowledge architecture can be built.

Outputs/results

Already in the first year (1998) about 10,000 staff used Connect as their key to the vast knowledge repository of BP Amoco. After four years the number of users is 32,000 (May 2002), one third of the whole company.

Lessons and conclusions

The basic philosophy behind this method is that the best medium for knowledge is the human brain and the best networking protocol is conversation. Therefore the emphasis should lie on creating the connection and building the relationship. On content and structure of the repository, a balance needs to be found between anarchy and structure.

The advice from the people who set up Connect comes down to three points:

  1. Keep the vision clear: create an environment where all employees can find the right expert and prevent the wheel from being reinvented through a ten-minute phone calls.
  2. Manage the relationship with the HR department: connect must not compete with the HR system, but complement it.
  3. Ensure that ownership of the personal webpage lies with the individuals: business relationships flourish when personal details are shared, people only do this if they govern the content themselves.

More general lessons on Knowledge Management in BP Amoco are:

        The difficult thing of knowledge management is that you can’t manage knowledge. Or, as author Collison says: “It’s like herding cats”. What you can do is manage the environment in which knowledge can be created, discovered, captured, shared, distilled, validated, transferred, adopted, adapted and applied. The ideal outcome is that employees manage knowledge themselves as part as part of their daily business without thinking of it as an extra task.

·        Knowledge Management is more about connecting to those who know the recipe more than capturing an encyclopaedia of knowledge.

·        If departments are set to compete with one another, free knowledge exchange will not take place.

·        A common response to Knowledge Management initiatives is: “We don’t have the time right now on top of everything else we have to do.” Then the response should be: “What if we told you someone else has already done the very task you are about to do. We just need to find out who and what they learned.”

·        Essential to Knowledge Management is a good communicator, a central person and also a person in each team who has bought in to the process. Best is someone who talks a lot. He or she has to get out there, find information and feed it back again.