Page 172 -

Knowledge Sharing and Communities of Practice 155

Box 5.6
An Example: Texaco

Texaco ’ s knowledge-management arsenal includes PeopleNet ( Gonsalves and Zaino 2001 ),
a custom-built application that lets employees build a personal profi le and post it as a Web
page on the company ’ s intranet. The content of the profi le does not have to be purely
work-related: Pictures and hobby lists coexist alongside users ’ summaries of their job
expertise. The PeopleNet content and the company ’ s e-mail systems are linked through
KnowledgeMail from Tacit Knowledge Systems Inc., which monitors an employee ’ s e-mail,
moving phrases that seem to refl ect a person ’ s expertise on a particular subject into a
private profi le accessible only to that employee. The person then chooses which phrases
to publish in a public directory to help others distinguish him or her as a potential expert
in an area. Someone searching for an expert in marketing crude oil, for example, would
get a list of people associated with that phrase; clicking on a name in that list would call
up a profi le of the person in KnowledgeMail, as well as a link to the person ’ s PeopleNet
profi le.
300 people at Texaco used KnowledgeMail through a pilot program in its fi rst year and
a half. It is considered to be a successful KM application. John Old, the company ’ s director
of information, recounts a meeting in which Texaco execs were sharing ideas on KM with
a business partner. In demonstrating KnowledgeMail, a colleague typed the word “ wire-
less ” and the top name on the retrieved list was a systems architect who was in the room,
but had never been identifi ed as someone knowledgeable in wireless technology. “ In any
large company, there are lots of conversations in e-mail that you ’ re not aware of, and there
are lots of hidden experts, ” Old says.

Box 5.7
An Example: British Petroleum

BP ’ s yellow pages (Cohen 1999) are entirely bottom up. About 20,000 employees (of
80,000) have personal pages. It takes about ten minutes to produce one using a form fi lling
approach, which contains a self-appraisal of skills and interests. No one vets the content,
but people rarely oversell themselves! People who leave BP may still have a page. Every
three seconds, someone makes a connection. The yellow pages are widely embedded in
the BP intranet; they are integrated into the search environment and are now a part of
how they do business.