Enhanced collaboration through SharePoint is a major Knowledge Management (KM) initiative at aluminium giant Alcoa, helping to raise performance across the global company.

James Grey, Global Knowledge Manager, Global Refining explains how KM is being used as a tool to train new staff and to facilitate e-Learning.

“The initiative began in 2005 to look at bringing people in similar roles together. We have nine refineries around the world that do fundamentally similar work and we wanted to link engineering staff together in communities,” said Grey.

“These people have an ability to contribute to change and at that level have a reasonable level of English language proficiency at all our locations worldwide.

“We set up a series of Communities of Practice (COPs) often led by our research scientists located here in Western Australia. We then started with benchmarking of different locations and looking at performance differences then asking why those differences were there.  This was conducted virtually, with very few face to face meetings used.

“That has grown into a more formal structured system of identifying best practices based on business need, documenting them and transferring, implementing and auditing implementation of them  This is very much in line with continuous business improvement using the global knowledge available within Alcoa to accelerate the rate of change.”

Alcoa began its KM network with the first version of SharePoint in 2005 and is currently running on SharePoint 2007 with plans to migrate to SharePoint 2010 in 2013.

“SharePoint has been the digital home for our communities of practice. Each of them has its own Web site which starts as a standard build then is customised to suit,” said Grey.

“We don’t have a lot of custom Web parts, it’s pretty much plain vanilla SharePoint and we supplement this with teleconferencing and screen sharing using Adobe ConnectPro or Microsoft LiveMeeting

“We do have Yammer inside the organisation as well and have done some testing in using Yammer instead of the SharePoint Discussion Board. This worked extremely well with the communities that we trialled it with but the integration between Yammer and SharePoint 2007 is extremely clunky so people moved back to the Discussion Boards which they found easier.

“If we did get improved integration with Yammer and our next version of Sharepoint for our communities, that would be better than the Discussion Board as well as offering other benefits such as being able to tag documents. 

The Communities of Practice are reasonably small with a core membership of 12-25 and up to a couple of hundred in the surrounding shell that are interested in observing the proceedings. There are presently around 60-70 COPs on SharePoint with around 1500 staff actively participating.

“We wanted to keep the communities small so it was easier to create trust and there is less external interference in what they do. Each COP is self-managed and this creates more of a team feeling. They know that they are part of a small group doing important work rather than a member of a huge online listserv.

So how does collaboration turn into knowledge? For Alcoa this is through the production of specific Best Practice documents that typically describe how to run a particular chemical process. 

“These describe concrete data, inputs and outcomes. When these Best Practice documents are signed off they remain in SharePoint housed within their communities’ bailiwick. The implementation is tracked and we audit every three years at each location,” said Grey.

“By introducing a new engineer to a community you give them an instant network so they don’t have to be with the company 10 years to learn who’s who. They can access relevant expertise more readily and they get a big digital library at the community’s web site as well as review past conversations. We are now starting to look at introducing e-Learning software to introduce the ability for people in the communities to record and reuse training information.”  Other initiatives on the agenda include better method to allow COP members to share images and video.

Within Alcoa, Continuous Improvement is a way of life.  Communities of Practice, enabled by technology, extend this to have a global reach and impact.

James Grey will deliver A Practical Case Study on KM at Alcoa at the KM Australia 2013 Congress, 23-25 July 2013, Crystal Palace, Luna Park, Sydney.www.kmaustralia.com