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Driving Business Excellence With Formal, Global Networks

Posted by Leslie Owens on September 21, 2011

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Perhaps no one understands better than Dan Ranta, Director of Knowledge Sharing at ConocoPhillips, that the challenge of sharing knowledge is very real — while the potential payoff can be large. Seven years ago, ConocoPhillips launched a large initiative to create internal communities of practice that would enhance knowledge sharing within the firm. With operations in more than 30 countries, encompassing job sites often in remote locations, the international energy company knew that to continue on its success trajectory, it needed to rapidly and effectively harness the knowledge of its highly skilled but geographically distributed workforce.

Today, the ConocoPhillips' knowledge-sharing program — built upon 150 global "networks of excellence" — is ranked as best-in-class across industries, and has documented hundreds of millions of dollars in estimated cash flow from its start in 2004 to the present. To learn more about how firms can drive business excellence with formal, global networks, I spoke with Dan in preparation for his keynote this week at Forrester’s Content & Collaboration Forum.

1) Can you explain the reasoning behind the proactive and reactive components of your networks of excellence?

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Harness The Voice Of The Employee For Competitive Advantage

Posted by Leslie Owens on September 8, 2011

What's a customer-obsessed company? One that is deeply committed to know and engage with its customers. The three winners of our 2011 Voice of the Customer award -- Adobe, Fidelity and JetBlue -- don't just train employees to deliver great customer experiences; they monitor service satisfaction and systematically act on what they learn. My colleague Zach Hofer-Shall calls this management and analysis of customer-generated information "Social Intelligence." 

I think the Voice of the Employee should share the spotlight with the Voice of the Customer.

Few clients I talk to analyze employee-generated information the way that they do customer-generated information. It's now mainstream to listen to customer opinions regarding your product's or service's shortfalls or what competitors do better. But it's cutting-edge to listen to employees as part of a consistent, automated, scalable, strategic initiative. I am not talking about reading private emails or sending an annual employee survey. Instead I mean mining solicited sources like open-ended feedback requests and unsolicited sources like wikis, content archives and public internal social profile pages.

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