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BP Amoco

Leveraging knowledge has become a fundamental driver of business practice for BP Amoco. BP Amoco has become a leader in knowledge management, vouchsafed by the fact that it was recently voted as one of the Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) by Fortune 500 companies. BP Amoco came second to Microsoft in the 1999 MAKE awards as was commended on its success in establishing an environment for effective knowledge sharing and continuous learning. This success has been driven by encouragement from the very top to optimize personal and corporate performance.

So what is the secret of building a knowledge culture? According to BP Amoco knowledge consultant, Chris Collison, it is not just about learning dry facts and finding and developing new experts. A true knowledge culture necessitates recognizing innate talents of employees throughout the company and encouraging sharing of know-how in a process that opens up new possibilities. This contrasts sharply with a regime imposing programmes from above. Collison draws upon an analogy of cooking a great meal to make his point: ‘You can only learn so much from a recipe, but if you watch how a master chef prepares it, then you can prepare a gourmet feast.’

Group Chief Executive, Sir John Browne, initiated the knowledge management programme in 1996, when he commissioned a task force to examine knowledge strategy inside and outside the organization. Subsequently a small central team was set up to act as a catalyst, and now the practice has become widespread. Under John Browne's leadership the company has become one of the most profitable of the major oil companies. According to John Browne: ‘Learning is at the heart of a company's ability to adapt to a rapidly changing environment. It is crucial that every time we do something again, we should do it better than the last time.’ The logic is that there is no point in ‘reinventing the wheel’ all the time. This requires that the company does not make the error of managing each business unit in isolation. In other words, knowledge must be ‘replicated’ throughout the company. Doing this is simultaneously a challenge and an opportunity. Browne saw the challenge as an opportunity, in stating: ‘Knowledge, ideas and innovative solutions are being diffused through out the world at a speed that would have been unimaginable ten or twenty years ago. Companies are only now learning how to go beyond seeing the movement as a threat to seeing it as an opportunity.’

From the start, the express aim of the knowledge management initiative was to drive performance improvement by encouraging knowledge sharing. Indeed according to Collison, BP Amoco estimates savings of millions of dollars in operational costs through knowledge sharing. This figure continues to grow, although the true extent of the gains is almost impossible to quantify, given the complex nature of the sharing expertise.

Sharing knowledge, the product of learning, requires trust which, in turn, depends on forging solid relationships. Without trust people will not share knowledge.

Collison suggests that managing knowledge is about ‘learning how other people do things, so you can do the job better’. A colleague and fellow knowledge consultant of Collison's elucidates further by stating that ‘knowledge management is not just a matter of discovering what the organization knows, but the how, the what, the why and the who’.

Connect: BP Amoco's knowledge resource

A key part of sharing knowledge is ‘knowing who knows’. An informal knowledge and expertise directory titled ‘Connect’ provides a Yellow Pages type of directory for areas of expertise throughout the company. Since the BP/Amoco merger more and more people have added themselves to the knowledge base. The intranet-based system features personalized home pages for over 16,000 employees, and the spiral of help continues to grow. Connect is not perceived simply as a resource management system designed to find people. Its major aim is to generate 10-minute calls and e-mail requests that could save the company tens of thousands of dollars by preventing ‘reinvention of the wheel’. In a company such as BP Amoco a simple enquiry could have the potential of saving millions. Moreover, given the size of BP there is potential for millions of such 10-minute conversations.

The philosophical thinking driving BP Amoco's knowledge management effort is that the human brain is the best repository for knowledge, and the best protocol for networking is through conversation. On the basis of these assumptions the company decided to place emphasis upon:

• connection (making it easy to post information and search it intelligently)
• conversation (prompting for the right information to generate conversation)
• relationship (creating an environment of trust for sharing to occur).

These form the bedrock principles of accessing the company's most valuable resource – 1 million man-years of experience.

The Connect system is based on a simple intranet-based template designed to make it easy for employees to create a home page. Individuals can:

• upload pictures and résumés
• self-select from an evolving list of expertise categories
• place contact details and network affiliations
• write as much as they want to
• place links to other references and web bases of relevance (intranet as well as Internet).

The Connect intranet system is designed to allow a balance between structured taxonomy of expertise areas and free form anarchic entry. Too much structure and employees feel that they are just box-ticking. Too much freedom, on the other hand, frustrates meaningful searches. To try and address this problem individual pages are grouped around specific business problems.

The existence and high profile of Connect acts as an important reinforcement for knowledge sharing behaviours. Posting a request for help is relatively simple. The critical factor, however, is not the technical reach-ability but human accessibility. Connect by definition is a participative process, and thus represents not just a way to locate expertise. Membership of Connect indicates a willingness of the individuals to be approached. Connect thus induces collaboration. It forces individuals to consciously think about why others may want to contact them and how they can help people find them.

Developing Connect

Connect was conceived from a pilot that was formed to generate greater transparency between a group of exploration consultants and their clients in business units. It started from a base of 500 upstream technical staff creating and maintaining personal home pages within the BP Amoco intranet. During the initial stages of development, the design was kept simple and open enough to incorporate the entire organization (i.e. with the capacity to extend from technical to commercial, administrative, operational and consultant staff). After series of learning-via-focus-group studies to enhance the interface, Connect was born.

During early trials BP Amoco partnered other major corporations engaged with similar efforts. From such benchmarking BP Amoco identified two important factors:

• the critical need to establish employee ownership
• boundaries needed to be defined and defended by the human resource function.

In line with these insights Connect is neither mandated nor is its content validated by line managers. Human resources staff also accepted it as a complementary system to their traditional functional protocols.

A key challenge, especially in the early phases of development was one of getting a critical mass of content and rapid participation. The Connect system was launched with a customer-facing group with stakeholder interest as pilot sponsors, and relatively easily reached a membership of over 1000. Following this pilot, other early adopters soon followed, and within a period of six months there was considerable momentum (around 4000 participants). By the year end over 10 000 staff had enlisted.

Making it work: the knowledge architecture challenge

The Connect intranet structure was developed around personal home pages on the premise that they are seen to be fun, creative and visually stimulating. Each personal page is full of links, and thus facilitates contact. Importantly, by providing staff with their own URL address, Connect acts as a unique layer through which it becomes possible to build a knowledge architecture. Connect thus constructs the bridge between explicit (codified content on the intranet) knowledge and tacit knowledge (in the individual's head). In many traditional knowledge systems the information seeker will find the right document, but possess too little information about its author and how best to contact him or her. By enriching such documents with links to the author's home page the contextual gap between the reader and author is bridged. This leads to the starting of an asynchronous relationship, even before real communication has started.

Building and sustaining momentum

In a company such as BP Amoco, in which empowerment is the norm, it would be very difficult to get people to produce home pages through edict. Mandate would ultimately run the risk of becoming a box-ticking exercise. In order to build and sustain momentum the company actively mounted an awareness campaign. The campaign:

• was led by a group of ‘Connect champions’, who came from a variety of backgrounds (geologists, marketers, auditors) and believed strongly in the benefits of a connected organization
• ran a variety of competitions, poster campaigns, desk drops, learning fairs and lunchtime publicity booths. For example, one Connect champion took milk cartons and pasted ‘Wanted’ descriptions. Each one described an employee within Connect, and the challenge was for curious staff to find the people concerned
• used promotional pens as token recognition of good practice examples with a personal thank you from the program director. The director's note would request and encourage other staff to use Connect, and invariably resulted in further conversions.

By these actions BP Amoco was able to engage the hearts and minds of its people, and so produce the behavioural and intellectual reflexes necessary for Connect's success.

Generating content

Generating content for Connect was a fundamental task. One basic problem with this task is that a large number of staff do not feel that they can contribute, or indeed understand the need to. Staff find it difficult to articulate answers to the question ‘why contact me?’ on an intranet page. Reasons for this can be manifold; from shyness and humility to myopic understanding of career progression and how the information will be used. To overcome these barriers the company ran a programme of deskside coaching to help people understand the technology and help individuals define what he or she had to offer the company. While this experiment created good content the company found it difficult to scale up the operation under harsh trading circumstances. As such, coaching was left to local staff on an informal basis.

The company detected a general pattern in content. Typically the emphasis of the:

• younger staff tended towards qualifications and competences
• mid-career staff towards experience and network affliations
• senior staff towards key relationships, often external to the company.

Keeping content updated

Connect's answer to the challenge of ensuring that content is regularly updated was to develop a ‘Fifteen Minutes of Fame’ feature that an individual gains when updating their details. On each update a Post-it™ icon would appear on the Connect screen and display the individual's photograph and details, until they were supplanted by another employee's update. While this led to fun-filled rivalry for prominence, the serious outcome was that it increased the likelihood of current and relevant information.

Likely future developments for Connect

There are plans to add new dimensions of communication to enhance Connect's capability. The long-term future of Connect depends on its ability to create and sustain strong relationships through building trust. Theory suggests that words constitute only 7 per cent of the message, 38 per cent is in the voice and 55 per cent in body language in any single episode of conversation. Currently, only word communication is possible. The future vision is to add further dimensions, by taking advantage of new multimedia technologies such as video clips.

Another challenge BP Amoco is addressing is that of immediacy, or how quickly can a user move from a vague request for expert help to a face-to-face encounter. BP Amoco aims to achieve this in three clicks: ‘find me’, ‘see and hear me’, ‘now meet me’.

Complementary tools and practices

Besides Connect, BP Amoco have developed a number of tools and practices to support knowledge sharing. The main ones are:

• Peer Assist – a ‘learning before doing’ process
• After Action Review – learning on the job
• Retrospect – a ‘learning after’ process
• Operation Value Process.

Peer Assist

Peer Assist is a simple process to encourage collaboration. Whenever a team or business unit is about to start on a new project, it is encouraged to get together with peers from other parts of the business to define the best ways of undertaking it. Through this process the experience, insight and knowledge of others are passed on to the team that asked for help. The process highly emphasizes, and works on, the importance of reciprocity.

Example: BP Amoco's Toledo refinery has estimated that it could save $10 million in turnaround costs by ‘reusing’ know-how from other refineries via the Peer Assist process. In making peer assist work a key learning principle was the importance of being very specific when requesting for help. In this instance, five international refineries were contacted to help. Not only did the five agree to help their ‘brother’, but the recognition from their peers led them to rejuvenate their own efforts and reduced their own costs.

After Action Review (AAR)

The AAR was originally developed by the US army, and only requires 10 minutes or so. Ever since its use in the army it has been recognized as a powerful learning mechanism for developing ‘unconscious competence’ or ‘learning by doing’, to the extent that it has been adopted by many world-class companies such as General Electric and Motorola. As a tool it simply involves asking four key questions on completion of any project or process:

1   What was supposed to happen?

2   What actually happened?

3   What was the difference?

4   What can we learn from this and do about it?

The AAR has been having a huge impact, particularly at front-end operations with BP Amoco.

Example: One pipe fitter in a US refinery conducted an AAR check, after a 12-hour shift, when a colleagues commented, ‘This is the first time in fifteen years that the supervisor or anyone ever asked me what I know!’

Retrospect

The Retrospect process was discovered being used by a BP Exploration team in the Gulf of Mexico, and subsequently was adopted company-wide. It is a process of capturing learning involving a facilitated session with people who have just completed a project. It attempts to distil key learning that will make a critical difference for the benefit of a future project team. A typical Retrospect session takes only a few hours, whereas a typical ‘post-appraisal’ extends over months. Also, Retrospect is globally used for driving continuous improvement.

Operations Value Process (OVP)

This is a group-wide process which uses the principles of knowledge management without explicitly identifying with it. This is in line with BP Amoco's efforts to embed knowledge management within the key business processes. The process in essence encourages peers to help each other achieve best practice. Every business unit benchmarks itself against a key set of practices and sets itself a twelve-month target. The results are then collated and a group-wide picture compiled. Through this a ‘dating agency’ approach is enacted and business units are brought together to share their strengths. Subsequently, good practices, tools, offers and requests are made widely available through the intranet. Additional to the OVP assessment, every business unit is invited to make three offers of help to share with the organization and to make three requests. This facilitates the brokering and match-making process.

Conclusion

All these efforts combine to create a knowledge-sharing culture. BP Amoco recognizes that all the efforts at connectivity, interaction and sharing will amount to nothing in the absence of the right culture. A knowledge-sharing culture underpins putting practice into place.