2014 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.
Allstate Business Insurance offers insurance solutions for small business owners. Its products, distributed through a network of 10,000 exclusive agents and 2,000 independent agents, are designed to meet the specific insurance needs of small business, including coverage for commercial vehicles, structures and liability exposures. Allstate engaged Earley & Associates to develop ABIe, a “virtual assistant” that, through an online avatar (dubbed “Abby”), provides Allstate’s 10,000 agents with fast and easy answers to questions about writing commercial insurance policies. ABIe was conceived of and developed for the purpose of addressing the high dependencies agents had for real-time support provided by call center personnel.
Apollo Education Group and its subsidiaries—University of Phoenix, Apollo Global, Carnegie Learning and College for Financial Planning—established a broad KM program to serve the higher education needs of working adults. Apollo initiated a Knowledge Center Support program that includes a continuous improvement loop. The initiative serves all consumers of knowledge include HR, compliance, enrollment, academic counselors, finance advisers, student services and the students themselves.
Boston Children’s Hospital (2014 WINNER) created OPENPediatrics, a learning platform that went viral in its beta stage, to facilitate a medical distance learning platform. OPENPediatrics today has users in 78 countries and 420 hospitals. Using contextually based software, OPENPediatrics makes local expertise accessible and available around the globe, and signals an important change not only in medicine, but also in software development. Contextually based software applications and platforms are designed to support a process or task—in this case, distance learning—and to hide a complex array of supporting technologies under an easy-to-use interface.
British Sky Broadcasting Ltd. consolidated four KM programs into iKnow, a single tool that has delivered a compelling user experience and has become the place to go for all knowledge. BSkyB reports its success can be attributed to its user-centric design approach. By optimizing KANA IQ, the BSkyB Knowledge Management team has made improvements for its contact center advisers, enabling them to work smarter and more confidently. Advisers are repeatedly achieving a higher Net Promoter Score (NPS), which indicates whether a customer would recommend the company to others.
Department of Transport South Africa oversees all modes of transportation in South Africa. The department embarked on an organizationwide initiative to centralize and standardize all document capture, case management and records management, with the ability to track and trace cases and to ensure workflow compliance. It selected EMC (emc.com) Captiva for intelligent enterprise capture, the EMC Documentum Platform for enterprise content management and retention policy management and EMC Documentum xCP for case management.
Dubai Police Force’s (DPF) KM strategy embraces both implicit and explicit knowledge, focusing largely on capturing implicit knowledge and converting it to explicit knowledge, because it was perceived that such explicit knowledge could be easily disseminated. One of the early official results of implementing the KM strategy among Dubai police was the Skills Investment Program established in 2004. That program looked to invest in the skills of DPF human resources through harnessing the potential, abilities and expertise of citizenship resources. It then employed appropriate scientific methods to elevate the proficiency of trainers/lecturers to perform best levels of theoretical and practical training to obtain overall development and self-sufficiency in training within and outside DPF.
EY went social with Yammer to drive engagement among EY people around the world and to improve the ability to collaborate on a global scale. Improved collaboration was critical to its ambitions to be distinctive among the world’s largest professional services organizations and to build the highest performing teams. EY believes ?that in order to provide clients with the benefits of working with a truly global organization, it is essential that its employees quickly ?connect, collaborate, discover and share quality information regardless of location.
Golder offers global consulting, design and construction services in the areas of earth, environment and energy. Its KM program provides a flexible structure that adapts to the needs of employees to provide its clients with the best solutions possible. Golder’s mission is to get the right information to the right professionals at the right time. In a consulting practice, the “right” knowledge is often the tacit knowledge developed over years of experience, so the fundamental tactic of the knowledge management program is to increase interconnectedness and relationships. As part of its five-year strategic plan, Golder has targeted reinforcing its technical expertise in its core service areas through development of networks such as technical communities.
International Monetary Fund is an organization of 188 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world. Its redesigned knowledge management program resulted in creating a dedicated portal where core, final and authoritative information can be accessed, researched and shared. The results are reported to the operational scorecard for the entire organization. An ongoing process for maintaining and properly updating that information was also implemented. Knowledge Exchange Documents made knowledge and information more prominent to support the work of the IMF and accessible so that consistent economic policy advice is provided to member countries.
Johnson & Johnson designed the Project Digitize Initiative (renamed EOS for its launch). The program targeted organizational improvements including providing audit trails of system activities at the request of regulatory bodies, ensuring audit readiness, reducing copy review cycle time, capturing digital signatures on approved content, ensuring a faster path to decisions and hot button issues, and providing the ability to store and manage assets in house, reducing the need for agency assistance.
KPMG LLP established the Insight Exchange as the place for KPMG tax professionals to share and find late breaking market observations from around the world, providing a fast and efficient place to see what’s happening right now. The Insight Exchange is found in KPMG’s Global Tax internal portal and enables KPMG Tax professionals to directly post their local tax news, observations and developments. Backend workflow processes ensure that posts meet global and local risk standards before they are shared. Visitors can opt to receive real-time e-mail alerts when new posts are added.
Lafarge, a worldwide provider of building materials, uses the Knowledge Plaza platform to ?implement and deploy a global KM network that guides, motivates and coordinates function teams at the corporate or country level through one tool. The program resulted in a significant reduction in the number of databases and silos. Further, the sharing of experiences and content increased, and the users’ behavior fundamentally changed to focus on the interest and impact of sharing. More than 4,000 employees (and still growing) use the platform per month and 3,500 documents, on ?average, are seen every day.
Mercer, a talent, health, retirement and investments consultancy, initiated a KM program designed to drive revenue generation acceleration by supporting marketing, sales and cross-selling, and growth in established and emerging markets. Further, it leverages content to innovate, and institutes content accountability of intellectual capital to mitigate risk of outdated content. It has increased collaboration among colleagues, supporting two-way communications through social functionality, leveraging gamification and enabling knowledge transfer throughout the employee lifecycle.
Microsoft has developed a knowledge management culture that enables better quality, innovation and shorter time to service delivery. Organizationally, KM practices are being institutionalized, thus increasing employee productivity and agility. Business agility and people readiness are the major outcome and benefits of the company’s KM investments, resulting in increased customer and partner satisfaction through higher quality, competitive delivery cost, customer-enabled innovation and reduced time to delivery.
Mindtree Limited, a global information technology solutions company, launched “Idea Campaigns” for a number of industry verticals. Idea Campaigns are designed to target and add further value to Mindtree customers through improved processes, features and product enhancements and service excellence initiatives. The results have been better quality companywide, higher productivity, faster response times, speed of delivery and shorter learning curves.
MITRE Corp. is a not-for-profit organization that operates research and development centers sponsored by the federal government. Key objectives in its KM initiative include enhancing senior-level customer stakeholder engagement to better understand strategic needs, producing a strategic needs plan for each customer portfolio with clear outcomes and milestones, aligning and mapping projects to portfolio outcomes, developing a more systematic and robust way to identify expertise needs and availability to improve project staffing, and executing a workflow system to enhance the quality and findability of deliverables. The new processes and tool suite resulted in reliable and comprehensive findability and reuse of people/expertise, portfolios, projects, customers and deliverables; tighter integration of knowledge processes with work program/operations; and better insight into execution status and quality of outcomes.
Tech Mahindra, which specializes in digital transformation, consulting and business process re-engineering solutions, ?introduced the “Industrialization Concept.” Knowledge practices and processes were initiated to reduce the knowledge lost due to attrition, prevent reinvention of the wheel and maximize Tech Mahindra’s intellectual capital. The process is supported by a centralized governance mechanism that enables reviewing, storing, searching and retrieving, and using those organizational knowledge assets. It is the usage or the application of such knowledge assets that takes precedence for the company. It emphasizes that context should decide what knowledge asset can be used in part or whole in that context, what value-added outcomes can be achieved based on a set of predefined measures, and what new knowledge can be generated using the existing knowledge assets.
Trinity Logistics creates logistics solutions designed especially for each client, requiring integration with the IT systems of the shippers, carriers and service providers that form each client’s unique solution. Trinity’s initial project focused on eliminating the manual back-office work and support required for less-than-truckload (LTL) shipments. The Kofax Kapow solution automatically accesses the carrier website to capture each shipment’s tracking number, track/trace information and invoice amount. Kapow then integrates with Trinity’s back-office operational systems to validate the data, and only if Kapow detects a discrepancy will an exception be raised for manual review. Trinity has been able to accelerate payment processing and has seen improvements in “days sales outstanding” as a result of faster invoicing and payment processing.
U.S. Army Combined Arms Support Command (CASCOM) is the home of the Army’s sustainment think tank. Its Knowledge Management and Process Improvement (KM-PI) initiatives have been underway for almost 10 years, initially driven by the need to share knowledge, expertise and experience across the entire force and ensure soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan could conduct their war-fighting missions as safely and successfully as possible. It encompasses the art and science of performing knowledge assessments, stimulating experience sharing, networking subject matter experts, ?facilitating synchronous/asynchronous collaboration, harvesting lessons learned, process mapping and management, data/content management, performance improvement, and implementing the concepts, practices and supporting technologies therein.
Wipro Ltd. has been committed to knowledge management since 2000. The company is motivated by enhancing client trust and maximizing the value of the business by providing solutions that integrate industry insights, technology and delivery processes. Its KM strategy is designed to simplify. By sharing the business process for knowledge creation and by standardizing knowledge management practices, measurement and maturity levels for all segments in the organization, the company provides a secure environment to ensure customer IP is protected and sustains the knowledge management setup, culture, design and deployment.