Knowledge management (KM) concepts and tools have long been available, but until recently there were relatively few successful applications. At Halliburton, the use and innovative application of a proprietary KM collaboration tool has helped support a boundaryless organization — an employee anywhere in the world can instantaneously initiate cross-discipline resolution to problem solving and innovation. In this way, the company is using its KM application to harness the “wisdom of the crowd” to effect changes at every level of the organization and revolutionize the way it makes decisions, transfers technology and delivers value to the customer and the internal organization.

Committees of practice
The company develops and supports communities of practice — groups of people with similar

Figure 1. The Baroid Fluid Services KM community’s portal page provides employees a single access point to collaborative discussions with the global organization, critical documents, project tools and current events. Collaborative discussion examples shown here include cross-product line discussions with the Cement and Field Lab communities of practice. These discussions originated from China, Egypt, Russia, Venezuela and several locations across the United States. (Image courtesy of Halliburton)
interests or professional practice — and connects them in the proprietary, collaborative workspace through a secure system. While all communities use common portal processes and tools, it is understood that each has unique needs and distinct business objectives. At the heart of all of these communities is the ability to communicate and collaborate around relevant topics. The collaboration tool enables anyone in the organization to:
• Ask a question;
• Push knowledge (best practice, idea, etc.) proactively to the community;
• See the original question/issue and all replies in one place;
• Reply with an answer or opinion; and
• Learn on demand by searching previous discussions and accessing managed content.

Collaboration tool structure
Some of the key functional and organizational aspects of the collaboration tool that enable knowledge sharing are:
• Collaboration communities are typically open to all employees;
• Discussions are categorized by each community;
• Discussion categories may be shared by communities;
• Individual discussions can be shared instantaneously among the communities of practice;
• Discussions are searchable by text, categories, time, author, etc.; and
• Closed discussions include a resolution so that one does not have to interpret the discussion threads.

Dedicated knowledge brokers for each community provide full-time administration to facilitate that community’s KM effort. The knowledge brokers’ primary responsibility is to oversee the collaborative discussions. Essentially, they ensure that questions receive answers, issues are resolved and stakeholders are made aware of developing challenges, solutions and opportunities.

Benefits of collaboration
The company’s broad definition and underlying goal of KM to get “…the right information to the right person at the right time” allows a broad interpretation of the what, who and when. The company’s diverse, globally experienced community uses the KM collaboration to:
• Provide technical support solutions;
• Discuss and review new ideas;
• Collect and validate, invalidate and improve ideas for new products and processes;
• Share lessons learned with the organization;
• Communicate customer needs, challenges and successes to expedite learning and adoption;
• Identify, act on and communicate health, safety, environmental and quality issues; and
• Capture all collaborative activity for employee development and enable contextual learning on demand.

The KM collaboration tools empower a single employee to cut through hierarchical, geographical, social and organizational boundaries to focus the technical expertise of the entire global organization on a specific problem, generally receiving first response within a few hours. The KM system is unique in that collaborative discussions can be shared among any or all of the company’s technical communities and support groups, facilitating a sharply improved understanding of the relationships among various oilfield disciplines and allowing alignment of well service processes and strategies across the organization. Ideas for new or improved products or processes submitted and technology gaps identified are reviewed collaboratively, improving our ability to innovate based on all of our customers’ drivers.

Case histories
New uses of existing products. An operator experienced a wellbore breathing and lost circulation problem while drilling the production interval of an high-pressure/ high-temperature well. Traditional lost circulation treatments failed and the operator was prepared to abandon the well. Using KM collaboration, the company’s fluid services and cementing personnel contributed to the development of a new solution that combined existing products and processes. The solution was successfully applied in the well within 27 hours of the question being posted. The customer benefit was that the entire cost of the well and associated abandonment was saved — estimated by the customer to be in the region of US $15 million. The customer adopted the new solution as a standard operating procedure.

Improved well planning. During well planning, a collaborative discussion between the fluid services and cementing communities identified contamination and incompatibility issues with the drilling fluid and engineered cementing solutions. The communities successfully identified an alternate approach that met job objectives while protecting fluid assets. Benefits included reduced risk and cost for the operator and an estimated savings of greater than US $500,000.

Through observing collaborations and receiving monthly reports on high-priority topics, leaders are equipped with a window into operations, affording them improved understanding of recurring issues, customer challenges and technology thresholds. Leaders use the collaboration tool to disseminate strategic initiatives and provide additional context when questioned by employees.

Facilitating adoption of new technologies. When any new technology is adopted, a learning period is experienced. A new, high performance water-based drilling fluid system was being introduced in Russia. The fluids team in Russia used the KM tools to learn about the fluid system, gain best practices from earlier adopters and shorten the learning curve. From a review of the questions asked by the team in Russia, it became apparent to the global product development manager that the unique challenges being faced in Russian operations were not fully addressed. A two-way dialogue was established to ensure that the product development team fully understood the challenges being faced and that the drilling fluids provided to customers operations in Russia were fully optimized for their purpose.

In addition to gaining technical knowledge through participation in global collaboration, employees develop and leverage their social networks and become more effective employees with strong operational, personal and strategic networks. Observation of employee participation in collaboration gives management an additional means to identify and develop potential future leaders.

The collaborative system is used to complement other market assessment tools by harnessing the collective capability and experience of our employees around the globe to more effectively identify, communicate and act on customer needs, market knowledge and potential solutions. By better understanding present and future market needs, we are improving our ability to meet the long-term technology and performance needs of the industry.

About 10,000 regular unique users of the company’s KM communities have helped each other improve our services. Our customers provide their satisfaction input at the end of every job through the company’s quality system. Our global customer satisfaction has improved over 2.2% in the past 4 years.

The KM collaboration tool enables all employees in the organization to work smarter and better enables them and the company to meet the key challenges — among them more difficult wells and less experienced personnel — facing our industry.