2011 KMWorld Promise and Reality award finalists

KM REALITY AWARD

In many organizations, knowledge management is just rhetoric. This award recognizes an organization in which knowledge management is a positive reality. The recipient of the KM Reality award is an organization demonstrating leadership in the implementation of knowledge management practices and processes by realizing measurable business benefits.

The KM Reality finalists:

Capgemini Consulting—The consulting, technology and outsourcing services group relies on its global delivery model called Rightshore, which aims to get the right balance of the best talent from multiple locations, working as one team to create and deliver the optimum solution for clients. The deeply and culturally embedded KM program in Capgemini is built on robust processes that continue to evolve.

Deloitte—The company's KM program enables client service practitioners to quickly identify experts, reuse content, acquire new skills and collaborate with colleagues and groups within and beyond Deloitte boundaries for the purpose of addressing clients' complex business problems and increasing the value delivered to clients.

Eastman Kodak Company—Its Technical Knowledge Management organization delivers worldwide integrated communications services and solutions that support the sale and service of Kodak and other company products and services at cost competitive rates. The 125-person team has a worldwide network of suppliers and partners to provide a wide variety of communications services including: technical writing, localization, multimedia, imaging, Web services, content management, programming and training.

Ecopetrol—The Colombian company finds and converts energy sources. Since its inception, its KM program has been designed to provide value to its clients and shareholders, securing people's integrity, process safety and environmental care. Its program has been to contribute to general welfare in its operation areas, with committed personnel looking for excellence, integral development and building long-term relationships with its interest groups.

EXCO Resources—The company is an oil and natural gas exploration, exploitation, development and production company headquartered in Dallas. Employees were spending 30 percent to 40 percent of their time looking for data. They encountered workflow issues with lease packets, well clearance and release-to-drill data. They needed an intelligent portal to their information and deployed a solution from PointCross to enable users to search through federated silos of content and data to find specific documents or data and all related information. By using the PointCross solution, EXCO wasable to perform indexing, geo-tagging, mapping, metatags/metadata, type-as-you-search functionality and crawling, as well as federated searching and a consolidation of the data with the EXCO taxonomy in one solution.

Federal Emergency Management Agency—The Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) mission is to support citizens and first responders to ensure that as a nation we work together to build, sustain and improve our capability to prepare for, protect against, respond to, recover from and mitigate all hazards. FEMA deploys HAZUS (hazards-United States) to manage a nationally relevant, standardized methodology that contains models for estimating potential losses from earthquakes, floods and hurricanes. HAZUS uses geographic information systems (GIS) technology to estimate physical, economic and social impacts of disasters. It graphically illustrates the limits of identified high-risk locations due to earthquakes, hurricanes and floods.

Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland—In 2006, the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank began enhancing collaboration and knowledge sharing through a communities of practice service provided across the entire Federal Reserve System. Given the success of that service, a formal Knowledge Management Support Office (KMSO) was established in January 2011, and the scope of the service has expanded to initiate collaboration and knowledge sharing across banking regulatory agencies. The mission of the KMSO is to develop, deepen and promote superior knowledge management and information sharing practices, capabilities and techniques that will provide greater productivity and capacity for the supervision and regulation business line and others who use the service.

Greenberg Traurig, LLP—Greenberg Traurig is an international, full-service law firm with approximately 1,800 attorneys serving clients from more than 30 offices in the United States. The firm quickly deployed a tailor-made enterprise information management solution from ZyLAB, which is fully scalable and proportional to any matter.

Honeywell Automotive de Mexico, S.A. de C.V.—Its Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices were taken as baseline to improve the performance of the Canada & Latin America service desk for Honeywell employees and further deployed IT service. For example, Honeywell Automotive Mexico administers a knowledgebase repository and uses communication channels such as FAQs and instructional videos. Knowledge management provides training to the service desk team and maintains a close relationship with incident management, problem management and release management.

iGATE Patni—The common brand identity of two organizations provides a full spectrum of consulting, technology and business process outsourcing, as well as product engineering services through business outcomes-based client engagements. The KM team formalized the methodology for creation, sustenance and growth of voluntary communities of practice (CoPs). The platform focuses on value through formal and informal conversations; it is well structured, yet flexible in accommodating both inside and outside perspectives, to bring in natural evolution and maturity. The proven approach has helped facilitate 20 CoPs, each with a distinct vision, mission and specific objectives.

International Monetary Fund (IMF)—The Information Health program was developed at the IMF in 2009 to bridge the gaps in relevant policies, processes, work practices, technology and user behavior across the information life cycle. While its IT Practice already had programs in place to monitor application health, IT service delivery and project portfolio management, there was little insight into the health of information throughout its life cycle prior to this initiative.

Maya Assurance Company—The company implemented Cabinet NG's (cabinetng.com) Shared Access Filing Environment (CNG-SAFE), which is designed to consolidate all information into one organized system. Maya's original goal with the document management plan was to go with an archiving solution, because it has a legal requirement to maintain documents for six years. However, as they slowly tested the product, they realized they could use it for workflow and processing files too.

MindTree Limited—Company Vice Chairman Subroto Bagchi launched the MindTree "5 by 50" innovation initiative, giving five employees a chance to build a $50 million business from their own ideas and play a leadership role of their choice. Bagchi chose to connect with the innovators personally, talking phases of the program, top management commitment and support and what was expected of the innovator, rather than sending out an e-mail campaign seeking ideas. Later, the idea campaign was initiated on the company's Neuron Innovation Management platform to support the entire selection and scrutiny process.

Newgen Software Technologies—Using its expertise in imaging-based document management, Newgen developed a KM system to function as a marketing repository of its DM platform, OmniDocs, and imaging platform, OmniScan.  Its business activity monitoring (BAM) tool was integrated with the system to measure key metrics and ensure that the most current information was available to the business users. Rights-based access is provided to access as well as to create or modify a document in the repository.

Partners International Global Campaign Against Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs)—it focuses on the root causes that enable IED networks while reducing the chronic fear arising from a systemic threat of IED use.

PepsiCo, Business+Information Services Division—Knowledge centered support (KCS) philosophy was implemented within the past few years, in a way that works for the organization. Rather than implementing multiple KCS roles, it has two: one for those who can create knowledge, anyone in the IT organization, and another for knowledge engineers, responsible for reviewing, approving and publishing submitted content. Just-in-time knowledge creation is encouraged and a collaborative environment allows sharing of experiences from multiple sources.

R.C. Bigelow—The well-known tea company needed to automate and increase the efficiency of, initially, its accounts payable department and deployed Digitech Systems' ImageSilo SaaS solution. While that department initiated the process, the success gained prompted adoption in the following departments: accounts receivable, sales, purchasing, customer service, human resources, payroll and the Tea Division.

Samuel Strapping Systems—The company manufactures and supplies a broad range of steel and plastic strapping, hand tools, edge protection, stretch film equipment and consumables, as well as standard and custom engineered unitizing equipment. The company installed SYSPRO ERP software. Forecasts produced by the software are entered into SYSPRO Advanced Planning and Scheduling software. The latter runs the figures through a model of the plants based on capacity constraints and inventory target levels, creating a demand scenario, which is then fed into SYSPRO Material Requirement Planning (MRP), creating jobs for production line scheduling, and aligning dates and production quantities.

TransMontaigne—The company distributes and stores petroleum products. To enhance its efficiencies and meet its goals, TransMontaigne implemented ReadSoft's SAP-certified invoice automation solution to convert paper-based invoices to electronic invoices.

VMware—Its KM program established a cross-functional ownership model integrating social media into all support processes-driving improvement with a synchronized relationship between customers, support and product development. Its ownership model creates a closed-loop feedback system by connecting the voice of the customer through social media outlets (YouTube, Blogs, Twitter, etc.), which the specialized product support team calls Bridges. For integration with front-end systems, the KM program's use of social media on the support site creates insights that motivated the design of social media on the corporate website.

Volunteers of America Chesapeake—Volunteers of America Chesapeake, an organization that serves nearly 2 million people annually, discovered that cloud-based document management functionality-without the cost, maintenance, administration and infrastructure requirements of traditional on-site solutions-saves time, resources and money that the organization could use to meet the human service needs of its community. Quick deployment and minimal training requirements mirror a non-profit's business model. Additionally, the revenue recovery of $30,000 to $50,000 has had an immediate effect on the ability of VOA Chesapeake to deliver its services.

Xerox—Its robust KM efforts have produced net positive results for its customers and the company itself. Solution delivery cost has decreased dramatically, and the remote solution rate has improved an impressive 80 percent since the program started. Other improvements are increased knowledge sharing, including increased supportability of product design; increased efficiency in solving problems; improved self-help capability on Xerox products; and removed silos between support levels. As a key enabler, the organization restructured to create a group dedicated to the development of tools and processes that support knowledge management, customer self-help and remote-assisted support.