Fluor (United States) Alan Boeckmann, CEO of Fluor, met John McQuary, Vice President of Knowledge Management, at his offices. 'We have a major challenge, John, and I need your help. Until the end of 2008 most of our activities in South America were focused in Puerto Rico through Fluor Daniel Caribbean. At Board level, we have now made a decision to expand across South America and we have opened offices in Buenos Aires in Brazil, Santiago in Chile, Lima in Peru, Caracas in Venezuela and Mexico City in Mexico. Our corporate knowledge and expertise is critical to our success in these countries. Please tell me where we are with our global knowledge manage- ment activities and what we need to do to ensure success across new markets in South America.' Mr McQuary began by confirming that Fluor had been winners of the 2008 Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise (MAKE) awards. 'At Fluor, we take a true enterprise-wide approach to knowl- edge management. This requires an expanded mindset for deploying and maintaining com- munities beyond what is required when the KM approach is targeted to a segment of the com- pany, is regional, or is not open to all employ- ees. We have also adopted a broad definition of knowledge communities that includes the global network of people and a technology platform providing integrated content, expertise, and dis- cussions. Every employee has access to every community, a rigorous community deployment process is followed, community performance measurement and auditing programs align com- munities with strategic business direction, and knowledge-sharing behaviors are integrated into all aspects of company operations.1 Mr Boeckmann interrupted and said: 'Take me slowly through what this means and how we can apply it to South America.' Fluor is one of the world's leading engineer- ing, procurement, construction and maintenance (EPCM) firms in a range of heavy industrial sec- tors: oil and gas, industrial and infrastructure, government, global services and power. Fluor employs more than 40,000 employees in 25 countries and had an annual turnover in excess of $22 billion in 2008 with profits of $721m. Fluor's knowledge management journey started in 1997 when they became aware that much valuable knowledge was being lost at the end of projects. The nature of their work meant that teams disbanded at the end of projects and reformed into new project teams. Lessons learnt on projects weren't necessarily passed on, with new project teams making the same costly mis- takes and dissemination of new approaches hav- ing limited success. This problem is inherent in any large project- based organisation whether it be IT, shipping or construction. Fluor was clear from the start that a community-based solution was required and that technology would be needed in some form to allow its large employee base to be connect- ed. They were interested in allowing employees to access and share their collective knowledge, which would result ultimately in benefits for the customer. They built a Web-based knowl- edge management platform called 'Knowledge OnLine' as part of their solution. In essence, this technology platform combined aspects of social networking with a document-management sys- tem that was constructed, owned and managed by the company. The focus was on open knowl- edge-sharing across organisational, regional and project boundaries. In 1999 Fluor started with two communities as a pilot. In 2000 the success of the pilot communities led to 32 communities with 4,000 members. Now there are 43 communi-es with 26,000 members including almost all of Fluor's professional staff (21,000). Each community has its own homepage with news stories, featured content and knowledge objects such as best practice guidelines, specifi- cations and tips and tricks. The emphasis is on material that other employees will find useful. The other aspect of the homepage is the commu- nity dimension. Users are provided with contact details for Community Leaders and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). There is a section on community mission and charter, community help and links to community discussion forums, a calendar of activities and a search function. Apart from tra- ditional search functions sorting results for rel- evance, Knowledge OnLine provides the user with contributor profiles for each knowledge object or discussion list searched. The user can see the con- tributor's past experience and projects and deter- mine whether to contact them directly. Another approach is for the user to start a discussion in the community forum by posting to 'Asking a Question'. Apart from the content and context of the question, the user also provides the date by which the response is needed.2 An example of the responsiveness of the Knowledge OnLine discussion forums can be shown by a process study conducted for a Kuwaiti client wanting a dehazing solution for diesel and gas oil to meet the Haze-2 specifica- tion at 77C. The client's initial judgement was to use an electrostatic coalescer and salt-bed drier with a water-cooled chiller. The project team found the salt-bed drier manual as a knowl- edge object on Knowledge OnLine and placed a request for any design and operational experi- ence of electrostatic coalescers and salt-bed dri- ers. They received three responses in three days from their Netherlands and Canadian offices with different design options and project refer- ences to each. The underlying advice was to pre-cool the diesel and oil to 60C which would avoid the need for a salt-bed drier. The project team packaged this solution as the Dehazing Facility Design and offered it to the client. The client was extremely pleased as the new solu- tion saved them 1m in equipment costs and future operating costs. This process study using Knowledge OnLine led to new work for Fluor with the same client.3 Employee participation was difficult in the early days of Knowledge OnLine. Fluor decided against the 'points'-based incentive scheme used in other organisations. Instead, they engaged new employees to use the new platform from day one and tried to show existing employ- ees through Global Communications that most of the resources used in their everyday work could be found either as knowledge objects or within one of the communities. The main incentives came from recognition awards annu- ally from their KM success-story contest and 'KM Pacesetter' award where employees were nominated by peers for epitomising exceptional knowledge-sharing behaviours. Over the past ten years there has been a distinct shift from a management-driven KM directive towards a more employee-focused one. The emphasis is on performing communities that can add corporate value to the organisation. To coordinate the KM system, John McQuary adds: 'At Fluor there is a central KM team of seven, but only two are assigned full-time to KM. Those two maintain the technology platform for Knowledge OnLine. The rest are part-time. Other team members focus on improving community performance and communication. I myself split my time between the KM programme and tech- nology strategies. Each community also has a knowledge-manager responsible for maintaining the content and people connections through the online community. Like the community leaders and central staff, KM responsibilities are either part of the job description or fulfilled by vol- unteers. In total, there are 200+ people globally providing explicit support for what looks like a corporately managed system'.3 Alan Boeckmann interjected and asked about the nature of the 43 communities and how they would operate with their recent South American expansion. Mr McQuary explained that all their communities fall into functional or business categories. The functional communities repre- sent different aspects of the project such as pro- curement and project management. Business communities are linked to certain sectors of their work such as mining, oil and gas and life sciences. Mr Boeckmann laboured the point and asked how their new employees would cope in these large online communities with over 1,000 members when Spanish or Portuguese was their first language. He asked Mr McQuary to reflect on whether there was any need for changes to Knowledge OnLine given their South American expansion and to arrange another meeting with him with some concrete plans. He confirmed that he was impressed with the way knowledge management had engaged staff at all levels over the past ten years and provided lasting value to the organisation.

Questions

1 What changes to Knowledge OnLine should John McQuary recommend to Alan Boeckmann in light of Fluor's rapid expansion in South America?

2 What are the shortcomings of Fluor's online communities and how could they be improved?

3 How can Fluor get employees to share project mistakes on Knowledge OnLine for the benefit of other employees and the organisation?