2016 KMWorld Promise and Reality award finalists:
KM Reality Award
The winners of the KM Promise and the KM Reality awards will be formally announced on Wednesday, Nov. 16, at the 2016 KMWorld Conference at the JW Marriott in Washington, D.C.
Ten organizations have been named finalists for the 2016 KM Reality Award, and 10 others are finalists for the 2016 KM Promise Award.
KM Reality Award Finalists:
Caruana Financeira—A pioneer in instant credit card issuance in Latin America markets and headquartered in São Paolo, Brazil, Caruana Financeira specializes in innovative credit and payment products for the underbanked, leveraged via mass transportation cards. The company wanted a KM solution that would enable quick and accurate access to people’s identification and credit information so the company could approve and issue a hybrid credit card on the spot. The credit card would be leveraged via the widely used mass transit card that commuters in Brazil employ on a daily basis to pay for bus, subway, ferry, boat, VLT, etc. Caruana joined forces with TR Process to streamline the card application process by implementing Lexmark’s Kofax Total-Agility software, which allows teams to automatically extract key data from credit card applications and use it to drive data validation and account opening processes.
FMC Technologies—FMC Technologies is a global market leader in subsea systems and provider of technologies and services to the oil and gas industry. On a long international flight in mid-2010, the company’s VP of technology read an article about how to leverage informal networks within a company. The article resonated with him because he knew FMC needed a systematic way for employees to collaborate, ask questions and share knowledge and discoveries. That need was validated when he learned of two geographically disparate business units that were developing a similar product. By connecting the two units, he saved the company 80 percent of the cost to create a new one. He wondered how they could enable those connections between people on a larger scale, without huge travel expense, to share information, experience and expertise. The KM journey began by building and leveraging communities of practice in a knowledge management platform the company calls The EDGE, which connects employees around the world with the experience and expertise of other employees.
Garrigues—The international legal and tax services firm headquartered in Madrid provides business law advice in the main economic scenarios of the global marketplace. Lawyers’ training is one of the cornerstones of the KM strategy, and lawyers joining the firm receive initial compulsory training in knowledge resources. Since 2014, the KM Department had provided that training on-site and online via the firm’s e-learning platform. However, that approach had its limitations: It only admitted content on video created internally by the KM team, uploading and modifying the contents involved a great deal of time and effort, and it did not allow remote access. The company decided that it had to go one step further in the lawyers’ online training and developed the Knowledge Virtual Classroom. The Knowledge team created the virtual classroom in 2015 on the social cooperation platform HighQ Collaborate. Now generation and publication of content by both the knowledge team and students are easy and dynamic.
Goodyear Tire—Realizing the importance of innovation, reducing time to market and knowing that a large percentage of its experts in tire technology functions would be retiring in five to 10 years, the Global Technology Division launched a knowledge management initiative. The KM program is already delivering results via a “Collect & Connect” strategy that minimizes the impact of retirements, globalization, complexity and increased mobility of associates. The vision for the KMO is to “put the organization’s collective knowledge at everyone’s fingertips via a healthy balance of Collect & Connect behaviors, which leads to better and faster decisions.” KM initiatives that deliver value to the organization are comprised of interdependent elements designed to target specific knowledge needs: one-stop knowledge shop, share what you learn, find what you need, transfer experts’ know-how, interactive teaching and learning, and knowledge networks.
Learning@Cisco, a division of Cisco Systems—Learning@Cisco addresses the technical talent needs of Cisco Systems’ customers, partners and network professionals. It also maintains the Cisco Learning Network, a large, active, corporately sponsored social learning network, as well as the development of new education, knowledge sharing and learning software, including the Cisco Collaborative Knowledge Suite. To prepare its workforce for the digital future, Cisco decided to shift its Services organization to a consultative, solutions-selling model. Services would need to cross-train 14,000-plus employees on the company’s cloud, security, analytics and data solutions business. In addition, employees would also need to be reskilled and upskilled to succeed in new positions that support the evolved Services strategy. The ultimate goal was to turn Cisco Services into the “Services Organization of the Future.” That was the foundational basis for My Services Connect, an internal platform designed to accomplish those goals.
NetApp—The large international company provides software, systems and services to help organizations manage and store their data. NetApp wanted to author, publish and globalize content in various languages to communicate internally and with its customers. It produces massive amounts of content; each product, for example, requires documentation to support it, including web pages, training, sales and marketing materials, product support information and technical documentation. Anna Schlegel, senior director of globalization & information engineering, identified the opportunity to improve the siloed architecture and better engage with audiences across 150 countries in a more coordinated and efficient way, first by creating a globalization center of excellence and later by annexing content strategy teams to the center. Among the technologies implemented were a number of solutions from SDL. Now content is translated faster and in up to 16 languages, and has increased from 1 million words of localization annually to about 30 million words.
Norton Rose Fulbright Canada—The global law firm mandated the creation of key performance indicators (KPIs) for KM, which were directly linked to process improvement and business development. The KPIs for KM include: training, advice and research, quality and efficiency, toolkits and matter maps, client-facing KM, collaboration/current awareness and technology/innovation. The firm developed a robust competency framework for its KM professionals. The competencies encapsulate the core abilities that the firm wants every KM professional to fulfill at each stage of his/her career and are used as part of the promotion criteria. In Canada, the firm has developed 400 annotated model documents across different practice areas to ensure that the highest quality work product is produced consistently and efficiently. The firm has launched a Global Enterprise Search initiative, in which its professionals around the globe can easily search and access information on people and client matters.
Quest—The revamp of the KM program was undertaken to identify gaps, rebuild the foundation, enhance the program and increase adoption, which would in turn improve engineer, customer and company success. Some of the pain points that needed to be addressed in the new program training were: why KM is important, misconceptions about KM, and how it benefits employees and customers. Quest put all employees through new training that focused on methodology, benefits and workflow. The company also trained KM champions, a team of advocates who became KM peer mentors to help teammates adopt KM best practices. KM competencies dramatically improved after the company implemented KM peer mentoring and provided refresher training, which highlighted how to be successful in some of the past pain points such as capturing content in the workflow. Buy-in and adoption increased, knowledgebase-create and modify numbers improved and customer views on the portal increased.
Tactical Training Group, Pacific, U.S. Navy—TACTRAGRUPAC instituted KM to maintain critical skills, as well as explicit and tacit knowledge to provide the Fleets an advantage over adversaries and ensure joint operational success in the face of continuing information growth. Pressured by 50 percent personnel turnover annually in key positions both internally and in its afloat customers, the Fleets can maintain, with the help of KM, the dominant awareness and visualization that provide a fundamental advantage in today’s battle space where information is both contested and congested. KM also supports higher-velocity learning, a key goal of the Chief of Naval Operations. By fostering human networks of people who know and trust each other, TACTRAGRUPAC has achieved higher-velocity learning, working through significant changes in operating environments and threats. The Fleet has been able to sustain previous performance levels in a period of reduced resources and improved performance in critical mission areas.
Vantiv—The company, a provider of payment and technology services to merchants and financial institutions, needed better systems for capturing, developing, sharing and using organizational knowledge throughout the enterprise, as well as for sharing it with its customer base. First, Vantiv had to contend with an immense volume of transaction-level data in a Hadoop data lake, in mainframe flat files and in an Oracle relational data warehouse. Second, it was stymied by a legacy environment that inhibited sharing, analyzing and visualizing data. On the back end, Vantiv’s technology leaders needed new procedures for gathering that data, ensuring its quality and putting it into a usable form. On the front end, they set out to create new reports, dashboards and knowledge management capabilities to leverage their rapidly growing big data assets. Vantiv created a KM portal, powered by Information Builders WebFOCUS software, that extends self-service analytics throughout the organization.