Knowledge Management in Engineering Activities of an Operating Company

A better Management of Knowledge is an actual need in the Oil&Gas industry. In the past years, as a matter of fact, the amount of information available to engineers and scientists increased exponentially thanks to developments of the ICT tools making therefore harder to handle it. On the other hand, industry practice is to keep the plant running, implying that decisions have to be made quickly and time is short to collect and examine all the possible information. A solution to these challenges is Knowledge Management, which is defined as the ensemble of processes that allow to capture, validate, consolidate, archive, re-use and diffuse knowledge in order to improve both business processes and innovation processes. To make it happen, new ICT tools and mindsets need to be developed and exploited. In Eni E&P Division, a Knowledge Management System (KMS) is operating since 2004 with the aim at facilitating and speeding-up the sharing of best practices, lessons learned and other Know How across the organisation; several ICT tools are employed, such as forums, mailing lists, SharePoint websites, webinars etc. The KMS is based on several Communities of Practice, which have the aim of conveying technical debate transversally to different disciplines and to the entire eni group, which is heterogeneous due to geographical location, culture, industrial sectors and discipline involved. The resulting interactions, moreover, bring the advantage of making explicit (and durable) all the personal knowledge of the members that would otherwise got lost due to turnover and distance among the employees. Taking into account the results of the first few years of implementation of the KM system in the engineering area, this paper will summarize the successes and lessons learned during the operating life of the Communities, to trace a road map for the future work.