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What happens when a star performer hands in
their resignation to move somewhere else? What happens at
times of economic slowdown, where every day brings another
story of hundreds - sometimes thousands - of people being made
redundant as their organization downsizes? As business
recovers - or even before it does - it is often realized that
some key knowledge walked out of the door, with longer-term
cost and performance impacts. Organizations are aware of this problem, and
many of them think of setting a systematic process in place to
systematically capture some of the knowledge of their
employees through all the time they work there, and there are
a number of approaches how to face this knowledge management
task, from Communities of Practice to mentoring programmes,
recruiting and retention strategies, and the use of advanced
technology. The drilling optimization group of a large
oil and gas service company uses Knowledge Technologies to
support three facets of such a knowledge management task,
capturing the experience, storing it in a knowledge base, and
retrieving it through a simple web interface. The knowledge base not only contains factual
information about drilling projects. It also stores the
relations of technical parameters and problems encountered in
projects. It provides links to the operating guidelines of the
company. Engineers can easily access this source of experience
through a search engine. So the knowledge management system
helps them to diagnose drillability problems faster and more
comprehensively. To build this knowledge management system
Knowledge Technology experts from the University of Aberdeen
supported the company. The Research Centre in Knowledge
Technologies in Aberdeen transforms the results of academic
research into bottom line benefits for industry, especially in
the Oil & Gas sector. The Advanced Knowledge Technologies group at
Aberdeen is the main source for the Research Centre. This
group around Professor Derek Sleeman and Dr Alun Preece,
Senior Lecturer, are part of a consortium that brings together
academics from Southampton, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Sheffield and
The Open University. Fuelled by a £7m research grant these
five Universities face the challenge to advance Knowledge
Technologies. The Research Centre draws also on the
experience of the Industrial Psychology Group around Professor
Rhona Flin. They have a strong track record of working with
the Oil & Gas industry on issues like safety management and
culture, accident analysis and crew resource management, and
health and safety and stress. “Strategy, leadership, culture, and
structure are strong enablers for knowledge management. So is
technology,” says Dr Peter Troxler, Manager of the Research
Centre. “It is important though to understand that knowledge
management is not merely a technology or IT issue.”
Knowledge management aims to make an
organisation’s knowledge – information and its corresponding
contextual interpretation – available to increase business
performance. Knowledge management is the sum of all the
processes that govern the identification, creation, capture,
dissemination, maintenance and utilisation of knowledge.
Managers are confronted with an enormous
amount of information. Reaching their decision they can be
sure of but one thing: they have not taken everything in
account properly. Elements of knowledge management can support
them – if only to anticipate surprise. Technology proposes one way to efficiently
handle information overload. Yet it must be much more
sophisticated than the average search engine. Key to this is
to see information in its context, and to interrelate
different pieces of information. Technologies that are able to
do this are called Knowledge Technologies. Knowledge Technologies are used to capture
and organise knowledge, to store and retrieve it, to keep it
up to date, to distribute it and to use it in many different
applications. Knowledge Technologies help companies to turn
individual knowledge into manageable assets. They are vital to
the success of companies seeking a competitive advantage in a
knowledge-based economy. There are many potential applications of
Knowledge Technologies in the Oil and Gas industry as it is
undergoing the transition from a labour intensive to a
knowledge driven business. Knowledge Management has become
state of the art, at least with the operators and the big
contractors. Knowledge Technologies, however, still offer a
big potential for deployment. (Text for business a.m.) Printversion |