Whether self-selecting or handpicked, a community of practice (CoP) often creates a new version of the corporate silo - a virtual silo

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Whether self-selecting or handpicked, a community of practice (CoP) often creates a new

version of the corporate silo - a virtual silo.

Topic, subject matter, location, purpose, educational background, choice, social mores, bias

and many other factors determine the composition and character of a typical community.

Some are subtly skewed, others appear like gated communities. Indeed, some are virtually

estranged from the greater community.

Hence, CoPs can be as limited as the silos they are intended to transcend. It is, therefore, not

often you find a company with a true, open, enterprise wide, inter-disciplinary knowledge sharing

system that really works.

But at Fluor, staff anywhere in the world, in any unit or function can log on and have access

to corporate-wide content, experts, discussion forums and more. They only have to be a

member of the greater Fluor community.

With 40,000 employees in 25 countries on six continents, Fluor is one of the largest publicly

traded engineering, procurement, construction, maintenance and project-management

companies in the world. Over the past 100 years, Fluor has become a global leader in

providing services and technical knowledge in five main areas - oil and gas, industrial and

infrastructure, government, global services and power. Its products and services include

designing and building factories, refineries, pharmaceutical facilities, power plants, telecoms

and transportation infrastructures.

Competition requires corporate KM

The nature of Fluor's business, not to mention the globally competitive market in which it

operates, drove the need for knowledge sharing and collaboration across the organisation and

across boundaries, resulting in a company-driven KM programme.

That's right; it's an open knowledge-sharing system, but constructed, owned and managed by

the company - quite contrary to those who believe that knowledge-sharing cannot be

managed, least of all from the top.

Well, think again. Almost all of Fluor's professional employees (21,000) are members of

Fluor's knowledge communities. There are 43 online communities that are part of the Fluor

Knowledge OnLine system. In them, employees find written practices, procedures, templates,

job aids and even career-path information. Likewise, they can connect with experts and

engage in discussion forums to address real-world project challenges in real time. It is both a

repository and a place for virtual communities and communication.

John McQuary, vice president and knowledge management (KM) lead at Fluor, says the

company neither commands nor cajoles employees to participate in the Knowledge OnLine

system or to join communities therein. "But it would be very hard for them to perform their

work without accessing the system," he says.

 

Top down; no apologies Transforming the corporate culture into one in which knowledgesharing

is done naturally - and globally - is hard work, says McQuary. "You do have to

maintain some flexibility, but you also have to remain firm in what you are trying to achieve,

and you have to remain true to the core values and fundamentals of your knowledgemanagement

programme."

The goals of the knowledge management programme and culture need to be clearly

supportive of the core business, he adds. "Unfortunately, there are too many failed attempts at

KM where the programme was given to a consultant to implement, technology was thrown at

the problem, or the organisation was not committed to the leadership requirements and

cultural change necessary for success," says McQuary.

Even if the organisation does not fall into this common trap, trying to create an enterprisewide

knowledge-sharing culture is still challenging. For a start, global scale requires global

leadership and that begins at the corporate level, while the focus radiates throughout the

company and down to every desktop.

In addition, knowledge management activity has to connect and be in tune with the critical

success factors of the organisation, while helping staff do their jobs better. Fluor, like many

other knowledge-driven companies, recognises that the purpose of a KM system is to get

better results by managing intellectual capital.

At Fluor there is a central KM team of seven, but only two are assigned full-time to KM.

Those two maintain the technology platform for Knowledge OnLine, the centrepiece of the

enterprise-wide KM system. The rest are part-time. Other team members focus on improving

community performance and communications. McQuary himself splits his time between the

KM programme and technology strategies.

The central KM staff are the enablers, the architects and global managers of the system. But

the system itself is truly global, not only in scope, but in process, too.

The majority of the 43 global knowledge-communities fall into two categories - functional

and business line. Functional communities represent the project-execution functions and

departments, such as engineering, project controls, procurement and project management.

Business-line community examples include upstream oil and gas, life sciences, and mining

and metals.

The global excellence leader for each function also fills the role of a community leader. The

leader's responsibilities include maintaining a global people network, defining the practices

and procedures for the function, defining career paths, choosing software and maintaining a

functional development-forum to help individuals advance in their careers.

The business-line communities each have a leader who is an executive within the business

line, often the business-line manager. Thus, the management and knowledge leadership of the

company are both parallel and interconnected.

 

Each community also has a knowledge-manager responsible for maintaining the content and

people connections through the online community. Like the community leaders and central

staff, KM responsibilities are either part of the job description or fulfilled by volunteers. In

total, there are 200+ people globally providing explicit support for what looks like a

corporately managed system.

Member's eye view

The top down structure provides an enterprise-wide framework. Beyond that, the challenge is

to make sure the structure and the content of online resources and communities are based on a

'member's eye view' - that is, seeing everything from the perspective of the user. Something

may make sense while self-contained in one community, but from a member's eye view (and

across the enterprise), it can be confusing.

"A good example is an experience we had with our administration community. The group

identified subject-matter experts (SMEs) in three areas - department administration,

executive administration and project management," says McQuary.

Within the administration community, these categories made a lot of sense, but from an

enterprise-wide perspective, project-management SMEs would be identified in the projectmanagement

community. "What the administration community was really identifying was

experts in project administration," adds McQuary.

To coordinate activity, the enterprise-wide system is supported from a corporate level that

includes a core group of common capabilities, such as content management, discussion

forums and member profiles. Member profiles are members' opportunity to share knowledge

about themselves, helping to connect people to people and their expertise.

Each community is configured and launched using a team of representatives for the

community working with the central KM team. "Experience convinced us we would need to

cross business lines and regional boundaries. But if the KM effort was perceived to be a

California or even US-based initiative, our global roll-out would have met resistance," says

McQuary. "By launching each new community on a global basis, and bringing the launch

message to just the community audience, we were able to establish enterprise buy-in by

engaging only that part of the workforce the community will directly support."

However, with open access to all communities, enterprise-wide, the emphasis on knowledge

sharing is crucial. Content has to be scrutinised to ensure that it makes sense in the crossovers

to the wider global community. Such scrutiny ensures that Fluor's KM system is not just a

black hole - sucking up information, yet releasing very little in return.

One of the roles of the central KM team is to help communities resolve communication issues

they would not otherwise have sensed. KM hierarchy, in other words, can be a good thing.

"An enterprise-wide approach means we can leverage ideas across communities and provide

some top down direction. That wouldn't be possible if CoPs were created on an ad hoc basis."

 

"This year, we introduced a community-audit process. This leverages existing discipline

audit-processes and tools resulting in minimal organisational pushback. It involves an

interview using a detailed checklist over six major areas - organisation, performance,

structure, content, communication, recognition and innovation. Preventative and corrective

actions are documented and resulting actions are tracked through completion."

Communication strategy

Just as Fluor's KM structure is both centralised and dispersed through community networks,

it focuses on communication at both an enterprise-wide and a knowledge-community level,

too. An internal-communications team, which includes two professionals, provides expert

assistance at both levels. "Not all messages are equal," says senior communications manager

Tara Keithley. "Knowing and segmenting audiences is key, as well as knowing what type of

communication vehicle resonates with each audience segment."

At the enterprise level, Fluor has a number of different approaches, the most prominent of

which is the Knowledge OnLine login screen, updated twice a week with relevant KMrelated

news and stories. Also, Fluor tries to encourage participation in a variety of different

ways, including specialised publications for different target audiences:

? KM Network newsletter - Aimed at community leaders and managers;

? 'Share This Knowledge' executive newsletter - Focuses on KM at an executive level

and is, therefore, sent to the executive management-team;

? TimeSavers - Provides tips and tricks on using the KM system and is sent to all

registered members of Knowledge OnLine (21,000);

? KM knowledge-community homepage - To help non-members ease themselves into

the system;

? 'Just in Time' e-mail shots - These generally include a 'trackable component' to

gauge how many people actually open the e-mail;

? Teleconferences;

? Fluor intranet articles.

In addition, there is an annual 'Knowvember' awareness campaign that includes a successstory

contest with an executive-judging component, as well as the culmination of a year long

'KM Pacesetter' award where employees can be nominated by their peers for exemplifying

good KM behaviour.

Care in the community

In the KM field, one school of thought is that to be effective in creating a sense of community

a group should be no larger than 200 or 300 members.

McQuary contends that actual performance should be the measure. Fluor has a few

communities of that size, but most of them are 1,000+.

Indeed, the Engineering Community has more than 13,000 members. But like in a physical town, the overall structure of a community enables the informal clustering of small groups.

 

You might call them neighbourhoods - sub-specialties within a community; people who have

come together to collaborate on a specific project; clusters of knowledge seekers and sharers

who have gained from the give-and-take of sharing; people who find themselves together in

multiple communities - small self-forming groups within the formal structure that eventually

contribute to it. The Knowledge OnLine system supports this kind of natural networking with

people connections, including instant messaging.

Face-to-face meetings on a global scale may be impossible in a CoP of 13,000 members, but

local informal gatherings have real possibilities.

Otherwise, face-to-face global meetings would be limited to business-line leaders who

routinely get together annually for other issues, and functional leaders who may meet every

two or three years. Personalising network activity, therefore, depends heavily on human

initiative supported by the people connections Fluor provides.

Many KM programmes fall when cold, hard return on investment figures are demanded to

support the investment of time and money - figures that are hard to quantify accurately

enough for any accountant's liking. While Fluor is not as insistent on KM metrics as many

other organisations, the programme does have to show value.

It helps that its core values fit one of the four company values - teamwork - which means

Fluor people must, "Respect each other's perspective, and share knowledge and resources to

achieve excellence, deliver value, and grow individually and collectively".

These values are supported by six main guiding principles, one of which is, "We will

continue to build methods to capture, share and apply our knowledge to deliver customer

solutions". These commitments come with expectations and the KM team still has to deliver

persuasive results. The team relies on statistics to show the volume of activity, as well as

success stories to demonstrate value to Fluor's management and its customers.

Breaking the rules

After 20 years of intense thought, study, research, experimentation and applied learnings,

there still appears to be few absolute rules behind the methods of KM. As soon as a standard

of practice begins to emerge through frequency of use and agreement of thought, someone

breaks the rule with a success based on opposite or modified behaviour.

From Fluor, we can conclude that top-down design, implementation and management of an

enterprise-wide KM programme can produce spirited participation. Virtual communities

larger than 300 can stimulate personal involvement. Stories can overcome the metric mindset

of traditional accounting. It's all about how you play the game. McQuary's team uses

corporate leverage where necessary. Communication to multiple and layered audiences

delivers the right messages in the right places.

And metrics work where things can be measured, while stories are effective where outcomes

are not just unmeasurable, but immeasurable. What is measurable, however, is Fluor's

 

success as a company in a highly technical and competitive global market. KM has arguable

played a significant part in that success.

Telling tales

This is one of the winning stories submitted by a Fluor employee during its annual

'Knowvember' KM awareness campaign.

Title: Access to alternatives via Knowledge OnLine saves €1m total installed cost (TIC) and

gets Fluor awarded new contract!

Description: This success story encapsulates the key values of knowledge management:

global collaboration, client value, re-use and competitive differentiation, made possible by

Knowledge OnLine. Allowed client to make informed decision, saved total installed cost and

led to new work order.

Success story: I worked on a process study in Kuwait for dehazing of diesel and gas oil to

meet the Haze-2 specification at 77°C. Roughly said, this meant reducing the water content

from 1000 parts per million by volume (ppmv) at 135°F [Fahrenheit] to 100 ppmv at 77°C.

The client-design basis was to use an electrostatic coalescer and salt-bed drier with a water

cooled chiller, to pre-cool the coalescer feed to 105°F.

On Knowledge OnLine, we found the salt-bed drier manual. This manual provided valuable

information. Among other things, it recommended maintaining an operating temperature in

the salt-bed drier at or below 100°F to restrict brine solubility in diesel. Via the Process

Community forum we asked for designing and operating experience with the proposed

electrostatic coalescer/salt-bed drier design, the effect of operating temperature on the degree

of drying, experience with alternative drying processes and advice on the most economical

design solution for the given capacity: coalescer/salt bed drier or vacuum drying?

Within three days, three responses where received, from Haarlem [Netherlands] and the

Calgary [Canada] offices. They provided project references/contacts for each of the different

design options considered. The information underlined the strong effect of operating

temperature on salt-bed efficiency: at too high an operating temperature the efficiency of the

salt bed is eliminated by the brine solubility in diesel. This insight was confirmed by vendor

information: "The dynamics of the salt bed is such that it is only 30-35 per cent efficient and

at higher temperature the water simply partitions back into the diesel stream."

Based on this information and project references, our recommendations to the client were to

pre-cool the diesel/GO feed to 60°F with a chiller before being sent to the coalescer and to

eliminate the salt-bed drier. The Fluor recommendation was recognised by the client as a

positive improvement. Knowledge OnLine allowed the client to make an informed decision

in favour of the new concept for the Dehazing Facility design. Based on the information from

Knowledge OnLine, the client asked to visit one of the project references mentioned: an

existing refinery. This visit was arranged through the Haarlem office and is now planned for

next month.

Value for the client: The elimination of the salt-bed drier saved the client money on

equipment cost (TIC reduced by €1m) and operational cost. In addition, elimination of the

salt bed drier will save a lot of maintenance hassle in future.

Value for Fluor: Client satisfaction: The client is positive about the alternative design

solution proposed by the Fluor team. They were impressed by the short response time, the

quick access of our team to Fluor's worldwide knowledge and expertise and the new

possibilities it opened (for example, the client visit to an operating facility). Our client is so

pleased that a new work-order has been awarded to Fluor: a similar study for the other

refinery of the client. This study represents a business value of €700,000. Once the feed

package is approved, to carry out the job would even fetch a much higher value for Fluor.

 

Question:

Discuss Fluor's processes and infrastructure in managing knowledge across the

organisation.