2013 KMWorld Promise and Reality award finalists

KM REALITY AWARD continued

Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart, an international law firm focused on global labor and employment, established a KM department to develop: ODSearch, to quickly and easily locate relevant sample and precedent documents from among the 20+ million documents in its document management system; ODConnect, a highly robust, widely used intranet; Ogletree IntelliCase, a proprietary tool to enable clients to monitor and manage employment discrimination charges with state and federal agencies; and ODComply, a compliance tool enabling clients to adhere to federal laws, regulations and court interpretations.

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which provides a forum in which governments work together to seek solutions to common problems, has established a knowledge management program to: realize efficiency in staff time to produce quality and timely information; enable a flow of information among staff and across OECD areas of expertise to facilitate the collaboration and combining of both tacit and explicit knowledge to produce new insight that informs policy advice; and lower the cost of assembling information across domains through use of taxonomy, tagging and automated generation of briefing book materials.

Pella,  a provider of home and commercial building construction components, deployed the KnowledgeLake (knowledgelake.com) Enterprise Content Management solution based on Microsoft technologies. Pella was able to significantly improve its business processes with employee productivity gains and a reduction in consumables and office space. Pella made improvements with a cost-effective investment in new technology.

SAP, a provider of enterprise software, launched a companywide search improvement initiative that currently centralizes more than 20 repositories that had previously been unconnected, covering the majority of SAP's internal and external knowledge management platforms. It has enhanced its technology to support searching across more than 28 million documents, pages and collaborative items in sub-second average times. SAP has individualized search and supports a full permissioning model that allows users only to see results of content to which they are granted access.

Sapient, a services company focused on business, marketing and technology, instituted Vox, a social, collaboration and knowledge management platform that was established to connect and strengthen its worldwide talent network by: aiding its people in forming communities of practice; speeding the identification of expertise within the firm; fostering a culture of sharing, learning and reuse; encouraging engagement with senior leadership and leveraging the "wisdom of the crowd" to develop ideas that advance its business and better serve its clients.

Schneider Electric, Schneider Electric, a global energy management and infrastructure company, deployed an enterprise community management program with the ambition to create new active communities of practice to help drive collaboration in areas critical to the business and also establish the guidelines to bring more visibility, participation and recognition in the communities that already exist. The digitization of this program was enabled by the deployment of  a companywide, broadly adopted social collaboration platform headlined "Spice" for its 140,000-plus employees.

Tech Mahindra, a global business and IT services company, developed an ambitious KM program that leverages industry and functional expertise and leading technology practices to enable customers to transform their business processes and improve business performance. The initiative enables teams to draw on the wisdom of specialists and subject matter experts across the enterprise, work together virtually to create strategic, operational and high-quality knowledge assets and deliver value-added services to customers.

The MITRE Corp., a not-for-profit organization that manages six federally funded research and development centers for the Department of Defense, Federal Aviation Administration, Internal Revenue Service/Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Homeland Security, Center for Medicare and Medicaid Studies and U.S. Courts, revamped its collaboration capabilities with Handshake, an externally accessible social business networking environment optimized for enterprise use, based on the Elgg (elgg.org) open source platform.

Tokyo Electron America, a developer, manufacturer and seller of semiconductor production equipment, flat-panel display and photovoltaic cell production equipment, implemented a powerful indexing solution to find technical knowledge where it resided, federate it quickly and in a logical fashion and allow employees to interact with the knowledge to not only find it but also to contextualize it for their specific needs. The solution from Coveo (coveo.com) allowed it to: improve upon best-in-class service performance in response to a growing customer base while keeping costs flat; develop further standardized and streamlined service teams across all product lines and regions; optimize resource utilization and continue to deliver high C-Sat scores; and provide quality-driven, knowledge-centered service execution.

VMware, a developer of virtualization and cloud infrastructure, launched a two-prong approach to KM: for customers and for employees. For customers, it resulted in 30 percent of customers self-serving instead of contacting the support organization, a 20 percent year-over-year increase in external traffic to the knowledgebase, and use of social media to promote self-service and alert customers to new content. For employees, it resulted in internal business processes added to the knowledgebase; increased linking between knowledgebase articles and customer cases; and deploying VM Link from Socialcast (socialcast.com), enterprise social software that facilitates increased communications and real-time knowledge sharing.

Wipro, a global provider of IT services, outsourced R&D, business process services and business consulting, has long been a champion of knowledge management, and its knowledge culture pervades the entire workforce (senior management, middle management, project engineers and contractors), customers, partners and external eminent experts in the industry. Every employee participates to learn, share, contribute and collaborate.