Preparing
for Conversations with Michael Behounek
What Makes KM
Sustainable
Michael Behounek
Director
of Knowledge Management, Halliburton
Houston, Texas, U.S.
 Introduction
During Edna Pasher's
STAR Series Dialogue in October, 2004,
talk turned to the sustainability of KM after the honeymoon.
A disturbing picture of the state of the World Bank's KM program
painted during the discussion led Jerry Ash, AOK's founder and
now editorial contributor to Knowledge Management magazine,
to pursue a story on the condition of the Bank's bellwether program.
The result is a
series of reports on the Sustainability of KM in the coming
February issue of the magazine which is also making strategic
changes to adapt to a changing environment - a new name, Inside
Knowledge, and a new format. Reports on changing KM programs
at the World Bank, Xerox, BP and Clarica/Sun Life will provide
a range of situations from one program in mid-life crisis to
another now dead. To help start Behounek's Dialogue, the author
will share a bit of those stories in advance.
Michael Behounek's
story at Halliburton is quite different - his program is not
quite as mature as the subjects of these reports and has not
(yet?) experienced challenges to sustainability such as those
facing the other four programs.
We've asked Michael
to focus on "What makes KM Sustainable" during his
tenure as STAR Series moderator, assessing the current strength
of his program to date and contemplating the future. We want
all the participants in this Dialogue to do the same.
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Biography
Michael Behounek
is director of Knowledge Management for Halliburton with responsibility
for KM strategic planning, project development and deployment.
He has led this effort from startup in 2001 to the present. The
main focus of KM at  Halliburton
is on using formal communities of practice to solve complex business
issues. The effort has designed and implemented 17 communities,
with all 17 delivering clear, measured success. KM has delivered
improvement in service quality, customer satisfaction and innovation.
In addition, a third-party
analysis has shown a return on investment of over five fold.
Halliburton's KM work has won several awards and has been recognized
as a leading practice by several KM benchmarking companies.
Before assuming
his current position, Michael was the global quality manager
for the Energy Services Group. He was responsible for improving
service quality, customer satisfaction and quality cost management.
Michael has held a number of other positions through out the
U.S. and Europe prior to joining the company in 1985.
His career has spanned
several roles in operations and sales. He began his career as
an engineer in the petroleum industry for wireline and testing
services. He has a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from
the University of Michigan and an M.B.A. degree from Pepperdine
University. He is a member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers
and the American Society for Quality.
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Our
Hypothesis on What It Takes
The following is
based on our observation and experience from the past four years
of doing KM at Halliburton. If the following is not done consistently
in an organization's KM effort, then there is a large risk of
failure down the road.
- To create sustainable
knowledge management, you need:
o Executive Sponsorship
- at the business
unit level
- for a small KM core team
o Vital business
need and an articulated business case
- Don't be a company
wide initiative
- Be project based
o Budget for appropriate
resources, including time and funds
- To ensure sustainability,
KM process design should include:
o Dedicated facilitation, embedded leadership
o Easy to use tools
o Integration into users' workflow (embedded)
o Reciprocity
- To maintain sustainability,
KM programs must be able to:
o Provide intrinsic rewards by making people more effective
o Provide validated, trusted information and solutions
o Adapt to meet business needs over time
o Prove value with a continuous measurement system
- Financial
- Business objectives
- Input, process, output
- To help sustainability:
o Focus solutions on assisting the organization in problem-solving
- At the business
unit level to drive productivity, quality and innovation
- At the job role level to help people in their daily work life
(reciprocity)
o Collaboration
is key, requires focus on the organizational environment
o Don't be hammer looking for a nail
o Details matter - taking shortcuts is dangerous
o Tie into existing efforts and initiatives
This is by no means
a complete list, but a foundation that can be further tested
and evaluated. Our experience shows if the effort starts to shorten
this list, it raises the likelihood of the effort failing. In
one particular case, one of our technology groups felt they could
do this on their own. They tried only doing part of the above
list, it did not work, and they came back to the KM core team
to re-launch their community.
A further thought
- there will always be other important changes according in an
organization (including the latest business fad, merger, market
shifts, etc.). Therefore, KM needs to be a catalyst in the environment,
to shift the environment and enable people to change in order
to accomplish the organization objective. If it does not, then
the longevity of the effort is at risk.
Introduction
and Background on Halliburton's Effort
Halliburton began
its KM journey in mid-2001 based on the vision and drive by the
CEO, Edgar Ortiz. The company's vision was to "be the real-time
knowledge company serving the upstream petroleum industry."
The company had already spent many years connecting and building
the infrastructure in order to electronically move, store, and
analyze data. The next step was to leverage this by unleashing
the knowledge throughout the 35,000 employees in over 100 countries.
There was one problem: At that point in time there had already
been notable successes in KM, but too many in our company saw
it as a very fuzzy concept at best. Worse, there were few case
studies that demonstrated clear business value or a pragmatic
strategy and methodology.
The large part of
our continued success was based on the original work we did in
the summer of 2001. A scoping team was tasked by the CEO to come
back to the senior management team with a recommendation on KM.
We immediately recognized we were late to the game and the best
thing we could do was learn quickly what was working and not
working in other companies. We contacted the American Productivity
and Quality Center and got help from Carla O'Dell to investigate
and help synthesize what was working. We examined over 15 different
companies, their approach, systems, methodologies and results.
We then came up
with our hypothesis on what would work and proposed three pilots
to try in several parts of our business. Our effort needed to
be pragmatic, systematic, and deliver measurable business results.
It also had to solve large complex business issues. Therefore,
being an oilfield services company, our major focus was improving
our service quality and customer satisfaction. The executive
leadership team sanctioned the effort and the rest has been an
incredible journey of hard work, success, and fun.
Our Approach
The components of
our efforts have been learned from other companies. What we tried
to do is assemble them all into a coherent, systematic approach
that delivered real business value. We use structured problem
solving communities. To date we have done 17 communities and
all have proven successful. Each had a unique business case and
exceeded their original targets, verified by the business unit.
These are by no means static. They are organic in nature and
do evolve, adapt. Communities have split and joined.
We use most of the
common KM tools and find big benefits using quality tools, social
network analysis, and surveys. IT is enabler for knowledge creation.
Our communities span many different areas inside the company
- from support of our service quality in our product service
lines, to technology innovation, functional support groups and
even our ERP system. Our users are very diverse - from PhDs to
field personnel, from warehouse to factory, from office to some
of the remotest parts of the world.
We have a vast number
of measures, stories and survey results. Part of our latest survey
of all communities (56% response rate of a 1000+ random sample)
showed these type of results:
| Statement
/ Question |
Positive |
Neutral |
Negative |
I don't know |
| I
believe that participation in the communities has a positive
impact on Service Quality for the business unit as a whole. |
87%
|
9%
|
2% |
3%
|
| How
would you rate the quality of the solutions generated through
community collaboration? |
Good
or Excellent
75%
|
Acceptable
or better
98%
|
2% |
N/A |
| How
many hours PER WEEK do you estimate the community portals save
you? |
3.2 Hrs/User/Week |
N/A |
N/A |
Discussion Items
for the AOK Dialogue
I want to thank
the Halliburton KM Core team members for all of their hard work.
The above represents a proud accomplishment by them and those
knowledge workers throughout our business. I also want to thank
Jerry Ash for this great opportunity to share and learn from
the best in this domain (I know most of you are probably much
smarter then me). Please give me your thoughts on the following:
- From your own observations,
do you support the stated hypothesis?
Our experience is only one data point and we are relatively young
at four years. In this time, we exerted effort to stay in touch
with the best practices out there. To date, we studied over 76
companies. What have we missed?
- Is there a critical
few?
In your experience, are there just a couple of "must do's"?
- Is there a specific
KM approach or strategy that increases sustainability?
Many things have been tried in KM. Which of them seem to survive
the best and under what conditions?
- Is there any company
that has a proven, consistent sustained effort (more then 5 years)?
Why do you believe they have?
CIO Magazine (4/21/2004) said
the following: "Cross industry studies show that up to 85
percent of all KM initiatives fail to achieve their business
objectives."
Thank you for spending
the time and effort to share on this important subject.
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