Analisi - knowledge management case studies - Aetnanet

By observations it was discovered that there is a culture arising within Shell, where people
are saying ‘I didn’t invent this myself, I took ideas from him.’ Using ideas from others starts
being encouraged and is popping up in some appraisal systems within individual operating
companies. In these companies it is more beneficial for an individual to search for solutions
already available, solicit suggestions and to admit that you have used someone else’s idea
instead of developing your own solution. In some parts of the company the appraisal systems
contain elements related to publishing information and to assisting others.
Comparing individual Shell companies or business units merely on their own bottom line
performance can be a hindering factor in knowledge sharing – sharing information reduces
the competive advantage of an individual company in comparison to their peers within the
Shell Group. This is to be compensated by including elements in the comparison as “total
contribution to the Shell Group”, “implemented innovations by and from other companies”.
Processes
Best Practice Transfer
In 1997 they tried a classical Business Process Benchmarking approach (some other oil
companies work this way). Which means taking business processes of exploration and
production, then step by step defining performance indicators for the various process parts,
analysing the process parts of the various Shell operating companies and comparing them.
Trying to explain the differences between good and bad performing operating companies,
then describing the ways of work of the best performing operating companies and transfer
this information to mediocre performing operating companies. This didn’t work at a global
scale for several reasons; the formal taste of it all was not accepted by the operating
companies.
Later, in January 1998, they tried to follow a very simple approach to best practice transfer,
learned from a network in the downstream sector of Shell. This network originated from the
reorganisation of an Amsterdam based central office group of 10 people (engineers, former
experts in the field themselves) which gave advise to colleagues working at Shell’s refineries
around the world. The main reason for the need of such an office is that many colleagues in
the Operating Units work remotely and may be one of the few skilled persons in the discipline
on that place. In some cases there is no other colleague present in the vicinity of hundreds of
kilometers. Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies decided to downsize its central offices
and due to this decision the Amsterdam based group of experts had to do the same work with
4 employees (40%) less. Therfor they came up with the idea to let the total community of
engineers in the field help themselves. This was enabled by letting them send a question to
the central office by E-mail or sometimes by a fax. The former expert at the central office
became the moderator who ensured that the question was formulated in such a way that the
engineers who were expected to answer it would interpret it correctly. The rephrased
questions were sent by E-mail to all engineers in the field. If it took the engineers to long to
answer the question, the moderator would start chasing for an answer, by calling people they
expected to be knowledgable to answer it. Doing so, the problem-owner got his problem
solved by his peers. Since all the questions and answers are collected in a worldwide
accessible database, the next time the same problem occurs an engineer first looks for a
solution in the database and therfor only needs to contact his peers via the moderator when
the solution is not available yet. The achievement of this network is $5+ Million benefits
/annum at $300k costs/annum. Based on the succes of such a simple concept New Ways of
Working decided to copy this concept and implement it into Exploration and Production
operating units. At the moment there are 60 communities.
Moderation
For the task of the moderator is refered to the previous section called: Best Practice Transfer
and the section called: Leadership and Management
No mandate from the top
At the moment the New Ways of Working group doesn’t get any funding from the top, they
have to market their services like any other consultant and find sponsoring Operating Units
for their R&D efforts. In the beginning New Ways of Working received a limited amount of
seed money from the top to develop and present their ideas on knowledge management and
the potential it might have for Shell. Following this initial stage they got R&D funds, coming
from a variety of Operating Units who were willing to invest in this new initiative in order to
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analisi-KM case studies.doc - 25/5/99