Computerworld
Quick Menu
Search



Ads by TechWords

See your link here


Subscribe to our e-mail newsletters
For more info on a specific newsletter, click the title. Details will be displayed in a new window.
ROI (Return on Investment)
IT Management
Computerworld Daily News (First Look and Wrap-Up)
Computerworld Blogs Newsletter
The Weekly Top 10
More E-Mail Newsletters 
Computerworld 2007Subscribe to Computerworld
40 years of the most authoritative source of news and information for IT leaders.

Knowledge management helps Intec be smarter by the hour

Time is big money at Intec Engineering, which posted a first-year ROI of 133% with a knowledge-sharing system.
Kathleen Melymuka   Today’s Top Stories   or  Other ROI Stories  
 

Sign up to receive ROI Resource Alerts

June 23, 2003 (Computerworld) -- It's hard to place a value on knowledge management systems. Their ability to generate income is often measured indirectly; their links to cost savings frequently seem tenuous. The return on investment is hard to quantify. Too often, the case for implementing a system to leverage intellectual capital and expertise rests mainly on intuition: It seems like a good idea.


But intuition wasn't nearly enough to sell executives at Intec Engineering Partnership Ltd., a company whose dedication to thrift is exceeded only by its passion for sharing knowledge.


Intec is based in Houston and has offices in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, England, the Netherlands, Malaysia and Australia. The privately held, $80 million engineering and project management company serves the international oil and gas industry. Its 500-plus employees specialize in marine pipelines, terminals and facilities. Clients include BP PLC, Exxon Mobil Corp. and ChevronTexaco Corp.


CIO Fran Steele says Intec's culture is "extremely collaborative," having grown from four partners in one room sharing knowledge using 3-by-5 cards indexed by keywords. "It's a culture of sharing information, with a strong bias against bureaucracy and anything that might constrain creativity," she says.


During 2002, as Intec grew through expansion and international acquisitions, it was becoming more difficult to keep track of and access information. Intec wasn't alone. According to KPMG International, six out of 10 employees say difficulty in accessing undocumented knowledge—such as the know-how people carry around in their heads and information that may be in documents scattered across a company—is a major problem. Framingham, Mass.-based IDC estimates that the average Fortune 500 company will spend $64 million on redundant efforts this year.


Early last year, a group of Intec engineers, later dubbed the Learning Team, volunteered to work on the problem of how to better capture lessons learned and share knowledge among Intec engineers. They diagramed how they solved engineering problems and envisioned an ideal process: An engineer with a question would go to a knowledge database that would either provide an answer or refer him to an expert. All new knowledge would be automatically captured and stored in the database.


The Learning Team decided that any technology to assist this process had to integrate existing knowledge resources, automatically find experts, capture results for reuse, facilitate the identification of best practices and provide a quick and easy user interface. Administration had to be minimal. "I wanted something that would not cost any more time of the people asking questions and answering," says Willem Timmermans, president and CEO of Intec. And ROI had to be clear from the start.


The Learning Team shopped around and selected software from AskMe Corp. in Bellevue, Wash., as the product most likely to facilitate Intec's problem-solving model. AskMe agreed to customize a three-month, large-scale pilot of the system for 250 engineers.

Continued...
1 | 2 | 3 | NEXT  



Print this Story Send Us Feedback E-mail this Story Digg! Digg this Story Slashdot this Story
Sidebar: Time is Money
Smarter by the Hour
"Lucky for you, though, Computerworld was there, and I gathered this collection of products and services for you to make..." Read more...
"Recent developments regarding human bird flu deaths put the archipelago nation (and H5N1) back into play...." Read more...
Read more Management posts or See all Blogs
When the meteor and the 1PB database collide
Former prosecutor: UFO hack looked like terrorist attack
Russian hacker gang steals with impunity, says researcher
Facebook stamps out malware attack
Ohio official sues e-voting vendor for lost votes
Politics 2.0 heats up traditional summer doldrums
Researchers look to cloud computing to fight malware
WAN optimization: Better than a 'real' upgrade?
Judge rejects student visa injunction sought by H-1B opponents
At LinuxWorld, problem-solvers hunt open-source solutions
More top stories...
Mozilla experiments push Firefox envelope
Microsoft: We'll help other vendors find, fix their bugs
Free Windows XP tuneup: Put new life into an old workhorse
Olympics goes all-HD for the first time
Microsoft promises 12 patches next week
WAN acceleration smells good to Coty
IBM launches three mobile software products and services
Bet on it: Employee wagers help companies predict the future
Search closing in on e-mail as most popular online activity, report says
First responders get more emergency communications options
Before the iPhone will ever rival the BlackBerry in the workplace, IT admins need to know how to best activate and deploy it to their workers. Part 1 of a three-part series focuses on activation and configuration.
How do you make a phone with the smallest possible size, but the largest possible screen? Blogger Mike Elgan knows.
Got a basement full of old components? Why not use them to build yourself a new PC? We show you how to do it.
Narcissistic employees — yes, IT has its fair share — can wreak havoc in the office and put your own job at risk.
Reviews, analyses, how-tos, visual tours, hot issues and predictions about Microsoft's new OS.
Four years from now, the IT field will be a vastly different place. Will you be ready?
All Zones
Application Performance Zone
Business Continuity Zone
Data Center Management Zone
Enterprise-Class Security Zone
The File Data Management Zone
Security Management Zone
ITIL Best Practices Zone
The SAS Zone
Storage Virtualization Zone
Business Intelligence and Analytics Zone
Identity & Security Management Zone

Ads by TechWords

See your link here
Deploying Windows Vista to the Desktop: Get It Right with Dell
Get this paper now!
(Source: Dell) Dell has improved PC deployment activities through patent-pending automation technology and offers an array of services from planning a Windows Vista migration to post-deployment management.
Download this white paper go
Google's Universal Search for Business
Google's Universal Search for Business
LIVE WEBCAST
Attend this live Google webcast on Wednesday, August 13, 2008 at 2:00 PM Eastern/11:00 AM Pacific.
Go to the webcast 
Managing For Agility
Get the full Computerworld report for a limited time, compliments of Computerworld and IBM.
Today's corporations need to bend without breaking. Agile IT operations can deliver products and services promptly, and then they can update and improve and reconfigure those resources as need be. But only good management practices will keep it all working together. In this Executive Briefing, we'll look at best practices for providing and managing IT in an on-demand world.
Download this executive briefing download
White Papers
Read up on the latest ideas and technologies from companies that sell hardware, software and services.
A Guide to Understanding Messaging Archiving
Archiving Compliance with Sunbelt Exchange Archiver
The Impact of Messaging and Web Threats
View more whitepapers