Corporate knowledge is the asset enabling an organization to take effective action, and make crucial decisions correctly. A key challenge for business leaders is how to engage everyone in the processes of knowledge capture, sharing and application. Increasingly, the notion of an internal knowledge economy is becoming a reality for many companies as they strive to become distinctive from the competition.

People and human behavior are at the core of KM. Robust approaches to leverage the collective knowledge of an organization must be adopted entity-wide in order to affect high standards of capture, transfer and application. If KM is to be successful, the organization must be given a clear framework to guide, support, monitor and continuously improve the integration of collective know-how in pursuit of specific business goals.

This paper describes a framework for managing knowledge, which is becoming increasingly adopted within BP's Exploration & Production (E&P) business segment. The Major Projects Knowledge Framework addresses the governance of knowledge as well as the support elements (people, process and technology) necessary to ensure knowledge is applied as needed, when needed and in a format that is usable by others.

Keywords:
knowledge management, Collaboration, responsibility, Knowledge Framework, governance, major project community, application, Upstream Oil & Gas, History, Implementation
Subjects:
Strategic Planning and Management, Professionalism, Training, and Education, Information Management and Systems, Project management, Communities of practice, Knowledge management
Copyright 2006, Society of Petroleum Engineers
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