Community Forum – Knowledge Sharing

What is your experience with knowledge sharing?

At last Friday’s outstanding Brown Bag, Dan Ranta of ConocoPhillips talked about their experiences and successes in Knowledge Sharing using proprietary Enterprise 2.0 tools for that purpose.  The whole area of Knowledge Management and especially Knowledge Sharing is an area of increasing interest and is critical to achieving efficiency at many IRI member companies.  With multiple locations and functions, often around the globe, it is becoming critical to be able to share best practices, ask questions and share challenges. 

• In your company’s experiences with Knowledge Sharing, what tools have you used? 
• What have you found to be the most significant barriers to adoption? 
• What specific strategies did you employ to overcome them? 

– Erik Whalen-Pederson, External Research Manager, Kraft Foods, Inc.

Community Responses

Director, Large chemical comany​

In your company’s experiences with Knowledge Sharing, what tools have you used?  Presently we are using SharePoint seven. There have been some efforts in the past to use Lotus Notes which resulted in mixed success.

What have you found to be the most significant barriers to adoption? Complexity: SharePoint has a lot of functionality not previously experienced.

Marketing: There were no attempts made to help people understand success. What we saw with the Conoco Phillips Brown bag was a successful implementation of knowledge sharing using SharePoint. Having seen it, it’s pretty straightforward to imagine how you might be able to apply similar constructs in your own circumstances. When SharePoint was introduced here, much of the market for the new technology considered it merely a replacement for file shares.

What specific strategies did you employ to overcome them? I’m not aware of an enterprise strategy to improve adoption. I think there are some. I know that there are people who are impassioned about knowledge sharing. But to my point, I am not aware.

Determination: Each opportunity I get to work with the group of people I find some way to promote collaboration and integrate SharePoint use into our work. My efforts are not always fondly received. But seldom have I been outright resisted.

Global Applications Market Development, Large chemical company

We have embarked on a community of practice / network of experts approach.  Formal business sponsorship and alignment are key elements, as is a clearly defined set of roles and responsibilities for participants.  Our objective is to connect some 500 technical and customer facing technical people spread across all regions of the globe.  We have established portals, connected them to formal and field classroom training and work to create a place of learning, a one-stop-shop for all knowledge needed to do the job and a place that is alive with activity.

Activation energy or initial inertia is one of our biggest challenges.  So are time differences and language challenges.  We need participants to take the leap of faith to participate even before the benefits are seen.  Chicken and egg problem – without participation, no benefits!

Our community of practice leaders go the extra mile to hold repeats of events durng normal business hours during these early days of our journey.   
We are careful to align to business objectives and thereby obtain executive level support and commitment 

Join the conversation! Email forum@iriweb.org