Finding NEMO at Bouygues Construction
By Eric Juin, chief information officer, Bouygues Construction
KM can be surprisingly tricky. It should be easy to leverage knowledge and expertise across a company, but bringing together all the information saved in varied and disparate systems and identifying the most experienced individuals can, in actual fact, be a daunting task.
In 2004, Bouygues Construction decided that it wanted to leverage the huge volume of know-how and information available across the organization. This was defined in a “knowledge sharing” roadmap. For Bouygues Construction, it was very important to determine up front what we wanted to achieve from the project to ensure that it increased the company’s competitiveness and significantly improved collaboration among staff. The two key challenges we identified were:
1) Real sharing of knowledge. We wanted the project to have a tangible impact on our business and that meant exciting staff about its possibilities.
2) Connecting employees with not only the document they required, but also the author of that content, who would be able to answer further questions or individuals mentioned for their experience and expertise.
In the beginning…
Bouygues Construction is a global construction company with annual revenues of €8.3 billion and 51,000 employees in over 80 countries. Our regional subsidiaries deliver a wide range of construction work, alongside global divisions that specialize in specific types of projects, such as dams, hotels and airports. Given our core business focus, the ability to assess project risk, determine competitive commercial terms and plan for contingencies is key to our ongoing success. The expertise and knowledge that we hold in relation to these areas is spread across IT systems, project records and is “hidden” within the know-how and insights of Bouygues Construction’s people and teams.
Despite the knowledge that we hold being one of our greatest business assets, people were "reinventing the wheel" almost every time they embarked on a project that brought new challenges. We wanted to be able to diffuse expertise across the company in a more timely and productive manner. This is especially important with the regional and global flow of new employees, contractors and project teams – we needed to ensure that they could quickly identify and leverage expertise that existed within our own ecosystem. It simply made sound business sense.
Additionally, the construction industry frequently encounters changing safety and environmental regulations, complex technologies and new rules in local markets. Working with outdated information can have serious commercial implications, and also threaten the health and safety of employees. Therefore, it’s essential that, as a business, we can modify information and disseminate information quickly in order to offset the risks inherent in new building projects. However, the business was very much operating in silos, each with its own intranet, making this exceptionally challenging.
Our initial thought was to create a single intranet, but we realized that not only would this create an enormous amount of work, it would also be contrary to the richness of the diverse initiatives going on across the group and would be hard to maintain in the long run. Consultations with vendors led to the idea of creating a LDAP [lightweight directory access protocol] meta-directory, where the profiles of the expert would be maintained. However, we felt this wasn’t practical, because expertise is not the only thing that matters when resolving a problem in the field. Very often experience matters more. So instead, we decided to create an independent tool designed to be the primary source of information for the company that all users could update, as well as creating “proximity administrators” who, in addition to contributing to the tool, would also be responsible for encouraging employees to use and update it.
Every day, consultants and project managers had questions relating to jobs they were working on. And the answers were there – just hidden in a maze of intranets. These intranets were part of a strong culture that enable individuals and teams who have become recognized leaders in their field to come together to share their knowledge and experience. These people are referred to as “people in the know” and have generally played an important role in the business over time. It’s these people, as well as content, that we wanted to provide employees with vehicle to connect with – no matter what part of the business they worked in. They existed, but how could we make it easier for people to find them?
One small step for mankind
Eventually we identified five (probably moving to seven in the future) main content categories across the company that company information could be stored under:
• Internal procedures
• Experience analysis
• Regulatory information
• On-going project status
• Miscellaneous documentation
Through identifying these key areas, we decided that an enterprise search engine, deployed across the various intranet sites to identify and classify various sources of information, was the answer. This was the logical solution to our KM problem; information would be searchable and staff could connect information with authors. We also felt that to engage users with the tool, it was important that we could brand it as our own. The search engine solution was called NEMO.
We decided to work with search technology provider Sinequa to develop NEMO for several reasons, most notably because of the company's next-generation approach to enterprise search, which extends access to knowledge beyond documents, identifying the context (for example, experienced people, partners, projects, geographies, and so on) and building professional social networks through experience and project evaluation. It was felt that these functionalities would provide staff with the avenues they needed to get real benefit from NEMO and enable them to truly engage with the tool, thus addressing the business challenges that we had worked to identify at the beginning of our KM project.
Challenges
Any project that proposes to change the way employees work is bound to encounter challenges – some expected and some unexpected. Bouygues had such a large number and diversity of information sources, security systems, data formats and languages that we were anticipating that set up would take a significant amount of time. However, because of the framework for connectivity inherent within the Sinequa CS search engine, it took approximately two hours to connect to each source. As such, we were able to deploy the enterprise search engine within six months across 450 data sources and five security domains.
What we weren’t expecting was a resistance to change. As a business, we had anticipated having to drive user engagement and adoption, but we did not consider that employees wouldn’t recognize NEMO as a much-needed tool for the business. Surely people knew how valuable their knowledge was to the success of the company? However, many senior employees did not appreciate how important their expertise was to the successful completion of projects, solving problems on site and winning new business.They were therefore unconvinced about the value of NEMO. Paradoxically, new engineers who had fewer years’ experience, but were used to online social networks and searching for knowledge, were keen to use NEMO in order to tap into the wealth of existing experience in order to help them in their job role.
To address these different approaches to NEMO, a reverse coaching campaign was put in place. This involved new engineers coaching the senior employees in professional social networking and its advantages, so that they could better understand how it related to the workplace and the benefits that could be derived from it. This exercise was incredibly successful in highlighting how important it was for new engineers to be able to find and utilize knowledge from more senior members of the team. As a result of the reverse coaching exercise, a solid network of mentors and advisors was established across the organization.
Business benefits
As a business, Bouygues Construction has really reaped the rewards of our KM project. Connecting staff to knowledge has had a profound impact on our business and operational efficiency:
- The ability to tap into other people’s knowledge has improved our approach to business, making us more successful and profitable.
- Staff are empowered. Previously if they’d had a pressing question, it could take them several hours – or even days – to locate the necessary information or liaise with someone who had experience of a similar situation. In many cases they often ended up reinventing the wheel. Now however, using NEMO, they can quickly identify the information they need and the person they need to speak with if they require further details.
- If we encounter any new regulations or local market rules, information can be quickly updated and distributed to staff.
- Using NEMO we can better assess project risk, determine competitive commercial terms and plan for contingencies – all of which are vital to our success.
A word to the wise
Based on our experience, I have two key pieces of advice for companies thinking of embarking on a similar project. First, board-level backing played a critical factor in driving end-user adoption of NEMO. People saw how committed the management were to NEMO and the benefits they truly believed it would bring and this had a positive impact on how they viewed NEMO. The project was driven by, and aligned with our executive strategy.
Second, a KM project can’t be forced; rather, it’s driven by user adoption. It’s therefore important that staff see the benefits and how it’ll support them in their job role right away. As the old saying goes, you only get one chance to make a first impression. If users logged onto to NEMO and found it hard to navigate or thought that the information returned by their search terms wasn’t relevant, we knew we’d have a problem. Therefore, it was vital to deploy a solution that would deliver value right away. In order to “promote” NEMO to staff, we diffused an internal marketing campaign that encouraged employees to start asking NEMO questions and start finding answers. Posters, videos, brochures, training and executive announcements, as well as video testimonials from staff highlighting the advantages of using NEMO, were used during the launch phase.
In essence, NEMO has revolutionized Bouygues Construction and our approach to knowledge sharing. It’s a valuable tool that delivers tangible business value and enables us to equip our staff with the right knowledge to respond to an ever-changing world.
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