Enhancing Social Knowledge Management to Drive Performance Improvement

摘要

Industry is increasingly realizing the role knowledge management plays in enhancing operational effectiveness. Effective knowledge management promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an organisation’s knowledge-based assets. These assets may include tools and templates, documents, policies, procedures, good practice and case studies. In the past, knowledge management in BP’s social practitioner discipline lacked a structured and disciplined approach. Valuable knowledge was passed on informally from team to team or through meetings and virtual forums, but not recorded for others to draw on. Skilled people (eg long term contractors on large projects) took knowledge with them when they moved on. This caused loss of lessons learned while planning and executing projects or running complex operations, making it difficult for new businesses to access the knowledge unless they could contact the individuals involved. This paper explains BP’s efforts over the past two years to develop and formalise knowledge management mechanisms for social practitioners and others involved in social risk and impact management. BP has developed and tested a range of mechanisms, including virtual networks and distribution lists, group subject matter experts on social issues, inclusion of social topics in a 10 year career roadmap for environmental practitioners, e-classroom trainings, social capability development for people who lead early environmental and social project screenings, recorded knowledge-sharing workshops, face to face forums, peer support, share points, intranet sites and electronic Q and A systems. The paper explains how BP’s efforts to improve and standardize social knowledge management are based on the interaction of three elements: people, process and technology. The authors highlight the need to draw on other disciplines, e.g. environment, project and operations personnel, external affairs, supply chain management and security, to achieve an integrated approach.