2013 KMWorld Promise and Reality award finalists

KM REALITY AWARD

KM REALITY AWARD Finalists

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.

Ameriprise Financial, a diversified financial services company, implemented a new KM system from RightNow to replace outdated systems. Internally branded as ASK (Ameriprise Source of Knowledge); key phases included design, build, migration, training, implementation and change management. Features include: search; guided assists (interactive decision tree system for highly complex scenarios or service questions); knowledge articles that are easy to find, use and improve; clear iconography; cross-portal data sharing; and a user-friendly interface.

Capgemini Consulting,  a provider of consulting, technology, outsourcing and local professional services, has been able to launch new offerings faster and more effectively by creating KM-customized frameworks, sales collateral and communications. The company encourages and facilitates connecting with leadership by launching Yammer. The result has been increased and better collaboration across the group by maintaining SME databases, moderators on collaborative platforms and generation and sharing of best practices.

Cisco Systems adopted a broad range of KM practices to measure the quality of its intellectual capital (IC). It set up a process to certify and validate its IC and established standards to identify additional needs for the business that add value, resulting in boosting the growth and value of the business and increasing efficiency and quality.

Deloitte, a worldwide professional services firm, has established a successful KM initiative that focuses on: seamless, unified search with improved taxonomy; an integrated global profiling system that fosters expertise location; a global content repository; collaboration and innovation across Deloitte's global network with the rollout of worldwide communities; and enterprisewide micro-blogging.

Dorsey & Whitney, one of the 100 largest law firms in the United States, partnered with enterprise search provider BA Insight. Dorsey & Whitney created a KM solution that could be built on top of its current SharePoint platform, which gave the company the ability to leverage existing IT infrastructure. The solution that Dorsey built, ultimately called Swift, requires minimal training and acts as a gateway to driving key activities of its legal teams including search and workflows. With BA Insight's TotalView for Legal application, Dorsey & Whitney moved toward creating efficiency with enterprise search.

EY, a provider of assurance, tax, transaction and advisory services, has a deeply embedded knowledge culture. Within practitioner teams, people more clearly recognize their responsibility to share their work and materials as well as to provide access to the best internal content alongside a library of external research sources. That helps underpin the idea of a global, coordinated knowledge offering where practitioners can address their knowledge needs using EY's intranet and in-house resources.

Flextronics, a supply chain solutions company that delivers design, engineering, manufacturing and logistics services, selected FirstRain's Customer Insights to increase sales production through: content to educate and empower sales expertise, which enables learning and competitiveness; tools to accelerate and automate sales functions to provide better performance for repetitive tasks, projects and data gathering; and a platform to manage and drive the sales process, in particular a mobile, cloud-based, Salesforce.com-centric infrastructure for cross-segment sales.

FMC Technologies, a global provider of technology solutions for the energy industry, implemented a knowledge management initiative to improve and facilitate the process of capturing and sharing knowledge and information, leveraging an existing structure of business and technical "councils." They created a defined process and supporting technologies for employees to collaborate and to use the council structure to solve business-related problems and align processes. Another outcome was the ability to push relevant information and discoveries to employees on topics pertinent to their roles and interests and to make it easier to find reliable answers to questions in a timely fashion.

HCL Technologies, a global IT services company, developed a KM program based on the tenet of "faster, smarter and better," including: knowledge-driven decision making, role-based onboarding, communities of practices, expert networks, project closures, enterprise search, forums for innovation through best practices, learning and development programs such as a KM academy and knowledge auditing of project closures.

Honeywell Technology Solutions' global technology and R&D center, a KM initiative, was designed to create a continuously learning organization that delivers ahead of the competition in a cost-effective way by: building on past experience; developing and using the capability of every existing and new resource; and by consolidating, creating and integrating effective core assets into its products, solutions and services.

IC Group, which develops interactive promotions, marketing, customer relationship management and loyalty rewards programs, created a successful KM initiative to lower costs, reduce risk, enhance processes, streamline procedures and effectively use talent resources.

Mercer, a global consultancy in talent, health, retirement and investment services, launched its knowledge sharing function and program in 2008 to: help drive revenue generation by supporting cross-selling efforts and growth in established and emerging markets; increase collaboration by fostering connections among colleagues; improve access to knowledge by standardizing all solutions, services and products; improve efficiency by instilling consistency, standardization and globalization of processes; and accelerate innovation by increasing innovation visibility, capturing ideas in real time and responding to client and employee suggestions.

Microsoft Services, which says, "Knowledge is what we sell," has created a knowledge culture based on intellectual property creation, sharing and rating. It has also developed a five-level KM model to assess the maturity in knowledge management by its practices, indexes of which have evolved and to track more than 30 KM key performance indicators at the worldwide level.

Mindtree, a global IT solutions company and longtime proponent of KM, established a new Value Add Program, a framework designed to address new generation business challenges for Mindtree customers, which uses a unique methodology based on an inventive model-leveraging systematic innovation techniques and problem definition and solving approaches-to help facilitate idea generation and deliver successful outcomes for customers.

NASA Safety Center is focused on improving the development of personnel, processes and tools needed for the safe and successful achievement of NASA's strategic goals. Through a variety of KM strategies and systems, it has become the source for safety information for the agency and provides cross-organizational collaboration through two approaches: support multiple NASA objectives (safety and mission assurance, knowledge management, risk management) and enable mission success (key knowledge access, knowledge capture, knowledge sharing and reuse, enable workgroups and collaboration).