Creating and Nurturing a Knowledge Sharing Culture in a High Performance Technical Group

摘要

The Petroleum Engineering function at BHP Billiton bears primary responsibility for providing estimates of the company’s oil and gas reserves and an understanding of the uncertainty surrounding them. Forecasting of production profiles, efficient completion design and analysis of data to calculate the number of wells and their placement ensure effective production. This paper is focussed on a hidden but critical success factor for the function - its knowledge sharing culture. Since 1998 the business plan for the function has been specifically designed to meet the organisation’s strategic needs by creating a global knowledge-sharing group to ensure that the 120 (approximate global contingent) staff are able to provide excellent, speedy and reliable results. This paper outlines how we have moved in four years from a largely regional, functionally isolated group to one which can move staff across the world quickly for short term projects, execute complex technical work successfully in virtual teams and respond within 24 hours (in many cases) to each others requests for assistance. Sharing our knowledge has become a natural part of the way we work. This paper outlines the need for change and for alignment to the organisation’s business imperatives. It also covers the issues that we faced in the implementation of the plan to move to the desired culture and the balance between organisational growth, maintenance of size and reduction in various offices. The vision, strategy and execution plans for practical implementation of cultural change are outlined along with examples of our success and remaining challenges.