Time flies when ...

Yesterday evening I had a few minutes to spare in my office while waiting for one of my tutees to arrive - I had offered her a lift to the Italian restaurant where we were meeting the rest of the tutor group. I didn’t want to get too involved in anything that I would have to abandon when she arrived so I set about tackling the ‘for filing’ mound on top of my cabinet. Several useful papers were rediscovered during this process and I also came across my notes from a presentation given at the University of Cambridge many years ago by Andy Boyd, then VP for Knowledge and Competencies at Royal Dutch Shell entitled “Communities of Practice: The key to business intelligence”.

Andy was outlining how Shell had invested in two main areas for knowledge management and information sharing within the company. One was the knowledge base - collating, digitising and indexing their existing paper documents into a searchable archive. The other was to set up a facility using the (primitive) email system they had in those (olden) days to allow someone in the company to ask a question that was troubling them. Their question was sent into a specific individual who then sent it out to everyone else in the company and any response was then re-routed back to the questioner. (You will gather that this was before the days of email lists and online discussion groups).

The knowledge-base took 80% of the budget and the email question-reply system cost 20%. The somewhat surprising finding was that 15% of the value for the company was in the knowledge-base and 85% was in the email system (as Andy said - it doesn’t take rocket science to figure out where to focus). Why is the value of the knowledge-base so low? In turns out that people couldn’t find the answer to their specific question there whereas there was often someone in the company who had faced a similar but not identical issue. Very rarely did exactly the same problem or question arise twice and so the documents in the knowledge base didn’t quite cut it. However, because the email system incorporated the human element, a response might go along the lines of ”We had a similar problem to yours - we tackled it by.... you could try ...“. This kind of response was often just what the questioner needed to solve their problem.

I stood by my filing cabinet wondering if Andy Boyd was still at Shell and whether the new version of this email system they introduced (online discussion groups) was still up and running or had moved on. I was able to answer the first part of my question by searching that now ubiquitous online database called the world-wide-web. Andy, now Knowledge Manager at Shell Global, has a blog and uses twitter. I could also download one of his presentations on Knowledge Management at Shell.

The answer to what Shell were doing now in this area was not completely clear from this search but as I flicked through the presentation I became aware of a series of muffled thuds. What on earth is that noise? Oh blimey - my tutee has been trying to get my attention by banging on the locked sliding doors downstairs. ”I hope you haven’t been there long?“ I offer humbly. ”Just a few minutes..“ she replies ”...I had considered throwing a snowball at your window, but thought I’d better not.“ I offered my apologies and suggest we get going as we are already late - I was a bit surprised that she hadn’t turned up on time.

The moral of the story - searching through an archive may not be the best way to find the answer to some questions, but it can sure pass the time.