2015 KMWorld Promise and Reality award finalists:
KM Reality Award
The winners of the KM Promise and the KM Reality awards will be formally announced on Wednesday, Nov. 4, at the 2015 KMWorld Conference at the JW Marriott in Washington, D.C.
KM REALITY AWARD
In many organizations, knowledge management is just rhetoric. This award recognizes an organization in which knowledge management is a positive reality. The recipient of the KM Reality award is an organization demonstrating leadership in the implementation of knowledge management practices and processes by realizing measurable business benefits.
KM Reality Award Finalists:
Absa Bank Ltd—A member of Barclays Africa Group, Absa Bank realized that its customer service process had become a complex web of phone and e-mail contact points and hundreds of complex processes, both customer-facing and internal. After the implementation of its KM program with software and technical support from eGain, in just under a year Absa moved from #4 to #1 in helpdesk availability, from #3 to #1 in the “knowledgeability” rating of administrative staff, and from #3 to #1 in the knowledgeability of call center agents, who are able to handle all calls.
Allergan—The $23 billion diversified global pharmaceutical company is a leader in a new industry model, Growth Pharma. Driving continued innovation and growth is the combined company’s strong commitment to R&D, with an investment of roughly $1.7 billion in 2015, focused on strategic development of innovative and durable value-enhancing products within brands, generics, biologics and OTC portfolios. The R&D information is created and managed in numerous disparate systems with dozens of repositories such as SharePoint, custom databases, file shares, and Documentum internally and Box externally.
Allstate Business Insurance—The division of Allstate Insurance is a provider of small business insurance solutions and worked in conjunction with Earley Information Sciences to develop ABIe, a virtual assistant that, through an online avatar (referred to as “Abby”), provides Allstate’s 10,000 agents with fast and easy answers to questions about writing commercial insurance policies. ABIe was put in place to provide agents with on-demand assistance directly through the online system they’re using at the time when most of their questions arise.
EY—A global leader in assurance, tax, transaction and advisory services, EY has launched Knowledge Champion. The program resulted in an engaged and motivated network of Knowledge Champions ready to interact with local practitioners, widespread adoption and use of knowledge tools by advisory practitioners, and a robust collection of credentials from Advisory engagements. With leadership support, defined performance metrics and goals, and customized awareness and learning activities, the coordinated approach provided service line practitioners with the necessary context and rationale for individually contributing to EY’s knowledge sharing culture.
Geisinger Health System—An integrated health services organization recognized for its innovative use of the electronic health record implemented Lexmark Kofax Insight analytics solution to improve patient care. It begins with providing nurses with more information about what’s happening on the floor at any given moment. It extends to the leadership team with an integrated dashboard so members can quickly see at a campus, enterprise or regional level how the organization is meeting the needs of patients. Needless to say, it was not always easy—or possible—to capture, integrate, analyze and present that data to the people who need it. A key reason for bringing in Kofax Insight was to pull data from various reporting systems into integrated dashboards designed to offer insight to personnel at several levels within the hospital, from nurses on the floor to the executive leaders.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Software Services—The strategy of Hewlett Packard Enterprise is to provide solutions for the New Style of IT, with complete end-to-end solutions in cloud, big data, security and mobility. Its mission is to make IT simpler, safer, more agile, faster and more cost-effective. Hewlett Packard Enterprise Software Services employs about 3000 internal and external employees across 50 countries. Its Services organization provides new, yet similar services, to many of its customers. Creating similar content every time the organization executes an engagement takes a lot of time and money. Providing KM practices and processes integrates the available assets and lessons learned in to a customer engagement with finite resources, thus potentially saving time and costs in the project. In addition, the organization needs to understand what knowledge is known by their experts and find ways to increase profitability through the reuse and harvesting of that knowledge. The KM team has been in place since 2007 and re-structured its KM approach in early 2013. We designed its strategy and detailed approach in a way that targets key business results and/or organizational improvements. In developing a metrics based dashboard, the organization tracked month-over-month reuse savings and implemented a performance goal aligned system that highlighted millions of dollars in cost savings. The re-structured KM Program led to better content quality, increased customer satisfaction and improvements in the organizational culture.”
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Global Customer Solution Center— The strategy of Hewlett Packard Enterprise is to provide solutions for the New Style of IT, with complete end-to-end solutions in cloud, big data, security and mobility. Its mission is to make IT simpler, safer, more agile, faster and more cost-effective. The HP Support-ScapeGlobal Customer Solution Center includes 5,000+ Engineers who support 3.1 million customer cases annually, covering multiple enterprise products in diverse customer environments across 180 countries and 18 languages. Since late 2013, the KM team has focused on creating a knowledge-centric culture among engineers to ensure critical information is documented, relevant, immediately available, and easily accessible. The key reasons to initiate knowledge practices and processes effective late FY 2013 were to deflect known issues to customer self-solve as well as to solve complex issues through efficient Intelligent Swarming (Collaboration).
Mercer—A global consulting leader in talent, health, retirement and investments, Mercer formalized its knowledge-sharing function and program starting in 2008 and continuously calibrates it to ensure its program is aligned to the firm’s business strategy. Since its formation, Mercer’s Knowledge Management Center of Excellence has built a foundation of processes for consistent knowledge sharing across the decentralized organization, redefining and refocusing priorities based on changing business imperatives.
Merck—Merck is an innovative, global healthcare company committed to improving health and wellbeing around the world. A strongly sponsored KM strategy enabled the KM program to begin conducting four initial capability pilots: Product Knowledge – knowledge about the characterization and manufacturing of Merck’s products; Technology, Process and Business Knowledge – knowledge about core business processes or core manufacturing technologies; Connectivity – connections to tacit and experiential technical knowledge; and Expertise – unique knowledge held by an individual that is critical to ongoing business at Merck.
Universal Orlando Resort—A Communication & Knowledge Management (CKM) Team was created and developed a Knowledgebase to provide up-to-date and verified information to internal audiences. That allows multiple departments to know the same knowledge nuggets that the other departments know. The CKM Team also created “Spotlight Talks,” which are weekly Knowledge cafes that allow employees to voice their opinions and ideas and talk about other KM initiatives that are in the works. It allows the organization to gauge the effectiveness of the KM initiatives on various internal populations throughout the organization.
Wipro Ltd—The global information technology, consulting and outsourcing company with 158,217 employees serving clients in 175+ cities across 57 countries formalized KM as a business discipline in 2000 though knowledge sharing and collaboration were happening earlier in pockets. Since then it is running across all parts of the business to harness the power of knowledge, enabling the company to continuously develop products and solutions. Wipro’s KM plays the vital role of bringing the collective knowledge to the individuals and team to deliver value to customers. KM acts as a backbone of the business processes to learn, collaborate and innovate in emerging technologies to create breakthrough applications and solutions.