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Putting Communities to Work
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June 03, 2002 (Computerworld) -- The staff at a SchlumbergerSema oil-drilling site in Indonesia faced a serious problem: A field engineer had inadvertently programmed the wrong instructions into a computerized drilling tool, and the problem wasn't detected until after drilling had begun. Was there a way to save the situation without the expense and lost time required to stop the drilling and start over?
At 5 p.m. in Indonesia, SchlumbergerSema engineers placed a call to the company's InTouch system, a program designed to put subject-matter experts in immediate contact with on-site staffers who need answers midproject.
Although it was 4 a.m. in Houston, within 15 minutes the head of the department that oversees the drilling tool had worked out a solution and transmitted it back to Indonesia. An hour later, drilling was back on track.
InTouch is just one example of how companies are starting to use online community tools to take knowledge management beyond its traditional role associated with chat rooms, data repositories and FAQs. Although stored knowledge is still essential, these new tools also allow employees to tap into the most powerful problem-solving resource they have available: one another.
"A big part of knowledge management is knowing which person to tap as a resource rather than looking for information in a book or report," explains Jonathan Spira, chairman and chief analyst at Basex Inc., a New York-based research and consulting firm.
Removing Redundancy
So far, SchlumbergerSema's 18-month program has reduced the time it takes to resolve technical questions by 95% and saved the Paris-based company more than $150 million annually - after factoring in the $50 million per year it costs to operate InTouch, says Reid Smith, vice president of knowledge management.
A similar system also brought big savings to Clarica Life Insurance Co. in Waterloo, Ontario. The insurer uses software from AskMe Corp. in Bellevue, Wash., to identify company experts in various topics and make them available to answer questions from other employees.
Employees can query the system by keyword to find existing answers that might match their questions. If they still aren't satisfied, the system also offers a searchable list of subject-matter experts who can answer questions via e-mail.
"The question might be, 'How do I go about investigating this error that the client reported?' They're usually about a particular part of a process in a specific plan," says Hubert Saint-Onge, Clarica's senior vice president of strategic capabilities.
By querying the system, employees can find out exactly what they need to know from others who are doing the same work.
The system paid off after Clarica acquired Royal Trust Co.'s Canadian group retirement business in January 2001. Suddenly, there were 200 new employees who had to learn to use Clarica's technology and methods while administering corporate pension plans, which tend to be very complex.
"We estimated they would need three months of full-time training," Saint-Onge says. Because of its knowledge management system, however, the company was able to cut its training time by two-thirds.
Results like these are why internal communities like InTouch are the fastest-growing area of online communities, according to Jim Cashel, editor of "Online Community Report," an industry electronic newsletter based in Alexandria, Va.
Because of financial constraints, many companies are scaling back their external customer communities, Cashel says. But some of these same companies are investing further in their internal employee communities because the benefits to the bottom line are hard to ignore.
"Internal communities are generally easy to justify financially," Cashel says.
Zetlin is a business technology writer in Woodstock, N.Y.
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