Knowledge management helps Intec be smarter by the hour

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.