I want to remind everyone that APQC's April 2010
knowledge management community call is coming up this week. The call
will feature guest presenter Linda Hummel, knowledge management leader at GE Energy, and her colleague Dave
Cerrone.
Since GE Energy's KM program was created in the second quarter of 2008
to support the company's sales and marketing team, the KM team has focused on
the program's four pillars: people, process, content, and technology. Hummel
and Cerrone will describe:
- how the foundation for the KM program was established with an emphasis
on Google enterprise search,
- how GE Energy is taking people search to a new
level with an expert locator system,
- how the KM team is measuring its success, and
- what processes are used to maintain content freshness and fill gaps.
This call will take place this Thursday, April 15, at 10:30 a.m.
Central. You can register for the call at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/469076536.
It was a great opportunity to be invited to present "Getting smarter about KM at GE Energy" on APQC’s April KM Community call. Linda Hummel and I (Dave Cerrone) are collecting and summarizing follow-up questions and we will be posting our responses through KM Edge, and encourage you to continue the dialog online.
This comment is in response to questions relating to our technology.
From a document repository perspective, our approach has not been to dictate a system, but rather integrate our Google search appliance (GSA) with existing information systems and processes. That being said, we do have recommended document repository to get new content integrated quickly. Today the document/information platforms our Google system can search across include Documentum, and internally developed and managed Libraries and Community/Group areas (SharePoint-like).
Our employee profile system (Facebook-like) is also built on this internal platform, and along with internal blogs and broadcasts (Twitter-like), we are able to provide connections to tacit knowledge through people, interest groups, and online discussions.
Our decision to leverage internal collaboration platforms is based on capability, cost, and speed to deploy…it wasn't a ground-up "build vs buy" decision.
In the end there are many technology choices, all with similar features/functionality…so no one technology is going to make or break the KM program. As we all know, the key is in how we integrate these technologies seamlessly into existing business processes, and strive to make the technology as intuitive and compelling/valuable as possible to avoid barriers when driving change in behaviors and/or processes.
- Dave