ConocoPhillips' TechLink tool enables intra-company technology transfer.

All of the buzz about knowledge management in recent years has resulted in a barrage of "solutions" designed to capture knowledge and make it available across the enterprise.

But in truth, much of what outside vendors are trying to automate already exists within organizations. People who have problems talk them over with others who might know the solution. People who have stumbled on a solution find ways to impart that information to others who might encounter similar problems. It's anecdotal, haphazard and disorganized - but often it works very well.

It only works, though, when employees know their co-workers and are aware of the internal experts within a company. When companies merge and reorganize, those lines of communication begin to break down.

Such was the case with ConocoPhillips. Not only did two major companies merge, but each brought with it other recently absorbed cultures - Gulf Canada and Gulf Indonesia on the Conoco side, Arco Alaska on the Phillips side. Within a few months of the Conoco-Phillips merger, the new company underwent a major reorganization. Systems of knowledge transfer that may have been sufficient in the past were suddenly no longer up to speed.

"People are so much better at transferring and applying technology and sharing best practices when they have established relationships," said Joe Leone, vice president of upstream technology for ConocoPhillips. "In the past year, it's taken a lot of time for us to get to know each other. There's been tremendous progress, but we've just scratched the surface in terms of the overall opportunities."

Leone's group is in place to help overcome those obstacles. Comprising about 420 employees, the upstream technology group spends a majority of its time providing technical services to the operating companies and business units. "This is work that, generally speaking, they request," Leone said. "It could be that they're drilling an exploration program and need help planning and executing a well, or it could be a very large, integrated, multidisciplinary study that takes many man-years of effort."

Additionally, the group spends about one-fourth of its time on R&D. It's not the only R&D group within the company, so it coordinates with the others and tends to focus more on near-term technology that's directly applicable to the existing businesses. Another 10% is spent providing support that's not directly requested but that can help the business units, and finally the group provides a framework and coordination for career development.

TechLink

A major key to the group's ability to carry out these tasks is TechLink, a Web-based tool that aids in knowledge transfer and also in personnel management. The 3,000+ employees in ConocoPhillips' upstream division have access to each others' expertise through this service, which combines Internet technology with the kind of anecdotal, wander-down-the-hall knowledge transfer of a tighter-knit group.

The process begins with a profile. Each employee is encouraged to fill out a personal profile, which automatically places them in a specific "community." Five communities exist within the upstream group: reservoir; geology and geophysics; production and operations; drilling; and infrastructure, engineering and project management. Each community has networks based on certain common functions or jobs. Each community also is comprised of a subset of disciplines, and community members can choose to become part of a discipline within the larger community. This places them on an e-mail distribution list.

Each member is rated on his or her knowledge in each of the disciplines, whether it's basic, intermediate or expert. "That's important," Leone said, "because if someone needs to know who the expert is in a certain area, they can go to TechLink and query that information, pull up their contact information and ask them the question." A member with a question can also go to the appropriate discipline and send an automatic e-mail to every person registered. Or they can approach members of the network.

Recently an employee had a question about turbines. "We use turbines just about everywhere in the upstream, but some are more common than others," he said. "This was a type that isn't used very commonly at all.

"A member was looking for help on a problem and sent out an e-mail asking if anyone was familiar with this type of machine. There weren't that many people within the company who were, but there were a couple, and they gave him advice.

"It's funny when you read them because they're so conversational - 'I had that same problem 2 years ago' kind of thing," he said. "But it looked like it really helped."

Those members who come across information that they think is useful to others can post it in a bulletin. "If you had an experience where you almost had a serious incident, or you discovered a flaw in a particular type of equipment, you could send a bulletin out saying 'Be aware of this situation' so that hopefully nobody else in the company will run into the same problem."

Finally, TechLink users can go outside the company through external links to service companies and professional societies.

Career development

A perhaps unexpected advantage to the TechLink profiles is the ability to manage careers. Employees fill in information about their career history, areas of expertise and desires for future assignments, and this data can be useful for managers looking to fill particular positions.

"Let's say we have the opportunity to do several new business deals involving heavy oil," Leone said. "How many heavy oil experts do we have within the company? It gives us an idea of whether we'll have to hire a bunch of people or whether we have them in-house."

When job openings call for experts in a particular discipline, TechLink can be used to generate a candidate list.

The payoff

So far about 75% of the upstream population has completed their profiles, Leone said. "The use varies by community," he added. "The infrastructure community uses it very heavily. The larger communities probably use it more because it's harder to know all of the people and have the personal relationships, whereas reservoir engineering is a fairly small community that's still getting up to speed."

Leone said that he's been keeping track of the amount of value realized from knowledge sharing. "There's no really good way of doing this; we're kind of guesstimating the value," he said. "But there are examples that led to increased production or prevented a failure or reduced costs. We have a database where people can record that information, and we track it to get a ballpark idea. As of November 2003, the amount of value we had for that year was [US] $185 million.

"There's a lot of value being created. But it's the tip of the iceberg."

With the success of the tool has come an awareness of how much more might be accomplished. This year the plan is to gear it toward project management. "That's a big focus for a lot of companies because the projects are getting bigger and more complex," Leone said. "ConocoPhillips is involved in $9 billion worth of upstream projects. Investing that large sum of capital wisely and efficiently vs. inefficiently will be a night-and-day difference.

"The opportunity to add value is definitely there."


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