2018 KMWorld Promise and Reality award finalists: KM Reality Award

National Park Service —The National Park Service (NPS) is an agency of the U.S. Federal Government comprised of more than 20,000 employees who manage all national parks, many national monuments, and other conservation and historical properties. Initiating its KM program in April 2015, NPS approached the design and development of its common learning portal (CLP) with a human-centered approach that leveraged Agile and design thinking throughout the engagement. Before the CLP, the NPS workforce had no consistent way to share learning resources or connect with colleagues around the US. Knowledge is now being captured and shared across the entire NPS. People are creating and participating in discussions they never could have imagined. Individuals are learning from people they never knew existed and have never met. The flow of knowledge and learning is visible and navigable in ways that NPS never thought possible, and the CLP gives the NPS workforce a voice and a platform to teach and to collaboratively learn with each other.

Schlumberger —A world-leading provider of technology for reservoir characterization, drilling, production, and processing to the oil and gas industry, Schlumberger launched its KM program in 1998 with a focus on people, knowledge, and processes that improve the products and services it creates and provides to clients. Critical to Schlumberger’s internal people connections is the internal curriculum vitae, known as a Career Networking Profile (CNP). The content of the CNP is written by the individual and contains important pieces of knowledge/information including current role and responsibilities, previous work experience, technical expertise, and publications. In addition, the InTouch service is an example of KM in action and provides technical and operational support to Schlumberger field engineers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Eureka is the Schlumberger initiative to provide the collaborative work environment, focused on knowledge sharing and connecting employees to technical experts around the world. Within this culture of knowledge sharing, the Schlumberger approach to KM enables people to connect, collaborate, and learn from one another daily, ensuring superior product and service delivery for customers.

Southwest Airlines —During peak travel seasons, Southwest operates more than 4,000 weekday departures among a network of 100 destinations in the United States and 10 additional countries. In 2016, the CEB (now a subsidiary of Gartner) evaluated the comprehensiveness of Southwest’s market insights function, and KM was identified as the only area where it had low maturity. This activity was rated as “very important” to the function’s effectiveness in meeting business objectives. Southwest’s goal was to democratize insights across the marketing department to help employees more easily find information about customers, enable better and faster decision making, and help retain knowledge and avoid redundancy. The company launched its first-ever KM tool which has allowed it to reach its goals as well as identify other areas of improvement, such as reducing knowledge loss during turnover, building trust in sharing/breaking down silos, lowering costs by reducing duplicate research/requests., as well as enabling self-service. Since launching to the marketing department, other groups throughout Southwest’s Commercial group have begun exploring the tool for their needs.