About the Client

The client landscape consists of approximately 35,000 end users. They are mainly engineers, scientists and other specialists work hand in hand as leaders in engineering and environmental matters.


Challenge

The client had a requirement to design and implement a system that would streamline and make more effective the process of sharing lessons learned on their large-scale engineering and construction projects. The Lessons Learned initiative ties into the overall vision of the Corporate Information Office of a unified knowledge management environment (KME). The KME plan is to acquire the right technologies to create a knowledge-centric, virtual organization that works collaboratively, and exploits emerging technologies leveraging corporate information and intellectual capital to their full potential.


Approach

Using in-depth stakeholder interviews and due diligence at the client site, Optimos uncovered a much larger issue with disseminating and sharing information than first anticipated. Over 65 disparate sources and stores of information were found to be repositories for several previous attempts at creation of a enterprise-wide lessons learned system. In addition, our consultants learned that it was not necessarily the lack of a system that was hindering efforts for the client, but rather the lack of a system that was founded on coherent, standard processes around submission and usage of lessons learned.

The Optimos team brought specific knowledge-based enhancements and joined best-in-class strategy, processes, and innovative technology to bring a holistic solution to the organization. Optimos proposed a solution for transforming the client’s intranet into a collaborative information environment based on MOSS 2007. The Optimos team looked not only at the technical issues, but also at the organizational dynamics, and built incentives to help them improve communication across the organization.

Further, the team removed barriers to adoption by automating several of their previously manual workflows and provided mechanisms enabling them to quickly find the people or data they needed. An information taxonomy was also developed to support more intuitive communication. By incorporating a grass roots approach and appealing to the end users, we successfully built organizational support from an enterprise perspective ensuring high-level (CIO) stakeholder buy-in.


Result

Optimos provided a roadmap for the client that started with a grass roots pilot, obtained buy-in from all relevant stakeholders, and delivered a technical foundation using Microsoft’s SharePoint solution that enables them to transform their organization, improve quality, reduce design cycle time, and reduce costs.