Analisi - knowledge management case studies - Aetnanet

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
enable more and better knowledge sharing. With respect to consultancy activities, New Ways
of Working get paid their hourly rates by customers in Operating Units asking services from
this team, e.g. all the Production Chemists in the Exploration and Production Operating Units
who want New Ways of Working to help them build a common interest network on
Production Chemistry for them.
Bottom-up
New Ways of Working started (see also: Organisational structure and HRM
Common Interest Networks
Shell has around 60 common interest networks worldwide and is in the process of combining
them into less, but larger communities with a broader scope. Each network covers a certain
related set of topics, part of their discipline. For example, the drilling engineers part of the
wells network are discussing about drilling ‘ultra slim’ holes and the people who purchase
drilling related equipment discuss their topics in their part within the same network. The
people joining a network are sometimes part of the core network and sometimes in the
periphery of the network and jump in whenever something that draws their attention comes
by. In order to ensure that the community remains active a moderator provides support. In
many cases a moderator moderates between 1 – 3 days each week. The most successful
larger networks have a fulltime moderator, funded by the Operating Units with a major
interest in the business processes discussed in the network. The moderator is:
the ambassador and marketeer of the community;
the community builder;
responsible for creating and maintaining momentum in the community;
managing, sometimes even editing the content;
ensures questions get answered;
and requests (and chases) for contributions.
The best expert is usually not the best moderator: other people may stop contributing if a
moderator keeps adding comments to contributions from others.
In larger, globally operating, networks three other roles are identified to support the
community: a Subject Focal Point, moderating a part of the network, Local Coordinator
energising all the members in his/her Operating Unit and a Global Coordinator acting as
chairman and energiser for the total community. For an explanation of their necessity and
their tasks is refered to the section called: Errore. L'autoriferimento non è valido per un
segnalibro. - Implementing new organisational structure slowly.
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analisi-KM case studies.doc - 25/5/99