2016 award winners-KM Promise and KM Reality
KM Reality

The winners of the KM Promise and KM Reality awards were announced on Wed., Nov. 16, at the KMWorld 2016 Conference in Washington, D.C.

KM REALITY AWARD winner

The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company

Realizing the importance of innovation, reducing time to market and knowing that a large percentage of its tire technology experts would be retiring in five to 10 years, the Global Technology Division of Goodyear launched a knowledge management (KM) initiative. The KM program is already delivering results via a “Collect & Connect” strategy that minimizes the impact of retirements, globalization, complexity and increased mobility of associates while enabling faster, better decision-making.

The vision for the company’s Knowledge Management Office (KMO) is to “put the organization’s collective knowledge at everyone’s fingertips via a healthy balance of Collect & Connect behaviors, which leads to better and faster decisions.” KM initiatives that deliver value to the organization are comprised of interdependent elements designed to target specific knowledge needs: one-stop knowledge shop, share what you learn, find what you need, transfer experts’ know-how, interactive teaching and learning, and knowledge networks.

Goodyear uses multiple methods to measure the KM program’s impact on organizational goals including KM maturity assessment, value pyramids, KM dashboard and external benchmarking. Every other year, Goodyear has a formal assessment of the maturity of its KM journey, which is designed and conducted via collaboration with graduate students studying knowledge management at Georgetown University (georgetown.edu).

Value pyramids provide a visual representation of progress that builds from activity to value-based measurements. The KMO creates a value pyramid for each key initiative and provides updates as new levels are reached. Because value comes from delivery results, it provides another means by which to recognize knowledge workers. The KM Dashboard is an intranet site with interactive graphs and charts for Goodyear’s KM tools that provide real-time statistics and trends. Goodyear frequently uses external collaboration and benchmarking to evaluate its KM program, measure its progress against best practices and keep its strategies and approaches progressive.

Goodyear reports that the KM program has led to better and faster decisions involving: findability skills, online collaboration habits, expertise definition and location, lessons learned definition and sharing, use of and benefits of tagging, cross-functional and cross-geographical valuation, knowledge worker recognition methods and multigenerational team approach.

Most importantly, the KM program has contributed to a 50 percent reduction in development cycle time. In addition, Goodyear has raised its KM maturity level from “ad hoc” to “reactive use” to now nearly “active use.” Its KM pyramids help the company document other benefits and make them visible. For example, associates using KM-developed Learning Journals achieve competency three months faster, project teams using the Knowledge Sweep method/service have saved up to eight weeks in development time, and the ACE Lessons Learned method has resulted in numerous updates to design standards. Overall Goodyear reports its global and cross-functional collaboration has increased.