June 2003

Below the Surface

By Megan Santosus

When Intec Engineering began life as an oil and gas engineering services company, managing knowledge was simple. There were only four employees. But it was also indispensible, because those four were the cofounders who had come from different companies, and the strength of their new enterprise lay in their collective energy industry know-how.

That was in 1984. KM remains indispensible for Houston-based Intec, but as the company has grown, naturally, the process has gotten less simple. Throughout the years, the company opted for KM tools and techniques that were appropriate at the time, beginning with 3x5 index cards with keywords, advancing to spreadsheets and then graduating to databases. Such systems were fine for sharing explicit knowledge�standard documents, policies and the like. But they fell short when it came to the tacit knowledge or the expertise that individual employees have, especially as Intec grew to around 300 employees and several locations by 2000. A voluntary task force of engineers convened to explore knowledge management needs and to look at ways the growing company could address them. "We wanted to be able to share lessons while a project is ongoing," says CIO Fran Steele. "We wanted to figure out how to capture that knowledge while in process, and how to support how we learn things around here."

The task force developed a flow chart depicting how they thought knowledge sharing should work. The main goal, says Steele, was to enable employees to find existing documents or to locate an expert who could answer a question, or at least find out how to get an answer. The group decided to evaluate expertise location software, and recruited Steele as an executive sponsor. Her job: Screen vendors for commercial and technical viability.

After evaluating three products, Intec selected software from AskMe Corp., in part because the company could implement it without much modification. The resulting employee knowledge network, called AskIntec, debuted on the company's intranet in 2002. Employees all over the world now use the system to ferret out information already on hand, or to make connections with internal experts regarding a specific question.

As employee knowledge networks go, AskIntec is fairly run-of-the-mill. After all, there's only so much ingenuity involved in creating a system to pinpoint corporate knowledge. What sets Intec's efforts apart has been its approach. From the start, Intec managed the KM project in a systematic way, beginning with the voluntary task force that created a flow chart and solicited Steele's input for selecting software. Intec used a project management philosophy when rolling out the system, including a written project plan up front that outlined the project scope. After deployment, the task force issued a closeout report complete with user feedback. Such a disciplined approach to KM helps reduce the risk of failure by insuring that project goals are clearly defined.

As the system gains momentum, Intec continues to pay attention to metrics in terms of questions asked and answered, searches conducted and documents found. The informal steering committee formed to suggest guidelines decided against the common practice of offering employees incentives such as Palm Pilots and MP3 players in return for contributions to the network. The whole point of an employee knowledge network, says Steele, is to encourage people to participate because they are truly motivated to share their expertise rather than earn a digital gadget. On the other hand, lack of participation may have its consequences. Intec is attempting to make knowledge sharing a criterion in performance reviews.

Intec now has 700 employees and each week between 300 to 500 people log onto AskIntec. The number of people who use the system is impressive, but Steele says that a group of 10 people answer a disproportionate number of questions. The company is working to spread the word and implement practices, such as including knowledge sharing in performance reviews, that will encourage more experts to contribute their know-how.