2010 Promise and Reality award finalists

Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU)—is the largest research institution in the state. OHSU’s mission is to educate health professionals, scientists, engineers and managers in top-tier programs that prepare them for a lifetime of learning, leadership and contribution. It emphasizes exploring new basic, clinical and applied research frontiers in health and biomedical sciences, environmental and biomedical engineering and information sciences, and translate those discoveries, wherever possible, into applications in the health and commercial sectors, while simultaneously delivering excellence in healthcare, emphasizing the creation and implementation of new knowledge and cutting-edge technologies. Through deployment of ZyLAB’s Information Management Platform, OHSU has been able to share knowledge and experience more cost-effectively, adhere to compliance regulations and reduce e-discovery costs and risks.

Reed Smith—With more than 1,600 lawyers, Reed Smith represents many of the world’s leading companies in complex litigation and other high-stakes disputes, cross-border and other strategic transactions, and crucial regulatory matters. With the change in the global economy, its clients began to expect their law firms to provide better and more predictable pricing. With more competitive pressures within the legal community, coupled with growing expectations by its clients, it needed to better understand how to manage matters and provide fixed fees on more work. To help with pricing, the firm built a budgeting system, and the knowledge management team created a matter taxonomy and time-entry-phase system to help better capture the type of work being done, as it’s being done. To help the firm better manage matters, it built a matter/project management system called ouRSite using Microsoft SharePoint.

Royal Haskoning—is an organization of engineers, consultants and architects operating internationally. Its KM initiative involved knowledge coordination, innovation sessions, knowledge exploitation (identifying knowledge to share with the outside world), facilitating apprenticeship, reuse of templates and embedding quality processes and procedures.

San Francisco Symphony (SFS)—is widely considered to be one the country’s most artistically adventurous and financially stable arts institutions. Founded in 1911, the San Francisco Symphony had years worth of content stored in boxes, making it nearly impossible to search and access material. The organization needed a more robust knowledge management structure where staff could easily search to retrieve images, media and documents. SFS chose Inmagic Presto Social Knowledge Network (SKN) application to improve availability and ease with which content and information is stored and made accessible—essentially extending the concert experience through social tools and collaboration. The system helps users access and search relevant content and community insight across information silos to create an environment focused on addressing high-value organizational processes and objectives. That has also helped SFS address a critical challenge—associating metadata with multiple types of information, including audio, video, documents and images.

Thomson Reuters—is a leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. The company’s Rapid Source Automation (RSA) pilot began May 2008 to centralize data collection and knowledge management practices in a center of excellence. Before the company began the RSA project, maintaining and expanding its already sophisticated Web data monitoring and collection processes was a huge effort. For example, one group within the company was manually monitoring 20,000 companies from 50 different countries for financial reports and news, in many distinct languages. There was simply too much data available for Thomson Reuters’ employees to effectively process and quickly add value for their customers. The RSA program, whose backbone relies on a solution from Connotate, has dramatically increased efficiency by requiring fewer person-hours while enhancing value to Thomson Reuters customers.

Time Warner Cable (TWC)—owns and manages home and business cable systems in the United States. Time Warner realized increased competition and customer expectations required new ways of conducting business, including streamlining data acquisition and disbursement both internally to its customer support representatives and externally via customer self-help tools. After initiating its KM program in 2007, TWC reports numerous redundant systems have been successfully decommissioned, reducing costs and unnecessary duplication of efforts throughout the organization. The KM system, called KEY (Knowledge Empowers You), continues to grow, adapt and rollout, and the information TWC is learning helps it to continue to improve the overall solution.

Trentino, Italy (Il Consorzio dei Comuni Trentini)—The 40 townships comprising the province of Trentino required a software-based solution that would provide immediate answers, such as how to renew a driver’s license, current road construction, etc., to its citizens in an easy and convenient manner. It called upon Expert System to implement COsmOs, a semantic search and analysis technology designed for mobile devices that allows users to text questions in everyday language and receive an accurate response on their handsets.

United Parcel Service (UPS)—Founded in 1907 as a messenger company in the United States, UPS has grown into a multibillion-dollar corporation enabling commerce around the globe. The IT services delivered to all its employees by UPS Shared Services are core to the company’s ability to operate efficiently and provide service excellence and accountability to its customers. The Shared Services department required greater process visibility and needed a method to clearly measure existing processes. It deployed a business process management system as a pervasive platform within IT to develop, deploy, measure and manage shared services delivered out to the business. It also created a cross-functional Governance Group/BPM Center of Excellence to lead team and organization process and technology training, foster a “process” culture and support organizational adoption.

U.S. Army— has developed MilTech Solutions through a collaborative set of online knowledge management tools, MilSuite, protected by secure Department of Defense (DoD) network firewalls, allowing users from all branches and organizations to share official non-classified internal information and engage in frank dialogue.

Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA)—As Singapore’s national planning authority, URA relies heavily on good knowledge and information management to capture, process and use a vast amount of planning-related information from multiple information sources. URA embarked on what it calls its knowledge management journey many years ago with initiatives such as a corporate intranet, electronic document management system and various learning forums. To meet new business challenges, it conducted a comprehensive study of various industry KM practices for insights and developed a comprehensive URA KM Governance Framework and list of KM programs to guide the development of knowledge management throughout the organization. The framework consists of five key areas: goal, strategy, approach and deployment, result/outcome, and learning and review.

VMware—has a proven record of virtualization and cloud infrastructure expertise. VMware realized that in order to scale and meet customers’ growing needs, it required a robust KM program, not just a technology strategy. Prior to the launch of the program in 2007, few of the support staff were motivated to participate in sharing or creation of content into the knowledgebase. The first area of focus of the initiative was on improving participation by educating the staff on the goals of the program both for the short- and long-term vision. New KPIs were established and continue to evolve as the program moves through the cycles of maturity. As the knowledgebase grows, it is now able to provide customers with access to information as published through the VMware blog, Twitter and YouTube, which has proven to be especially effective when launching a new product.