Connect was conceived from a pilot that was formed to generate greater transparency between a group of exploration consultants and their clients in business units. It started from a base of 500 upstream technical staff creating and maintaining personal home pages within the BP Amoco intranet. During the initial stages of development, the design was kept simple and open enough to incorporate the entire organization (i.e. with the capacity to extend from technical to commercial, administrative, operational and consultant staff). After series of learning-via-focus-group studies to enhance the interface, Connect was born.
During early trials BP Amoco partnered other major corpora- tions engaged with similar efforts. From such benchmarking BP Amoco identified two important factors:
● the critical need to establish employee ownership
● boundaries needed to be defined and defended by the human resource function.
In line with these insights Connect is neither mandated nor is its content validated by line managers. Human resources staff also accepted it as a complementary system to their traditional func- tional protocols.
A key challenge, especially in the early phases of development was one of getting a critical mass of content and rapid participa- tion. The Connect system was launched with a customer-facing group with stakeholder interest as pilot sponsors, and relatively easily reached a membership of over 1000. Following this pilot, other early adopters soon followed, and within a period of six months there was considerable momentum (around 4000 partici- pants). By the year end over 10 000 staff had enlisted.
Making it work: the knowledge architecture challenge
The Connect intranet structure was developed around personal home pages on the premise that they are seen to be fun, creative and visually stimulating. Each personal page is full of links, and thus facilitates contact. Importantly, by providing staff with their own URL address, Connect acts as a unique layer through which it becomes possible to build a knowledge architecture. Connect thus constructs the bridge between explicit (codified content on the intranet) knowledge and tacit knowledge (in the individual’s head). In many traditional knowledge systems the information
seeker will find the right document, but possess too little infor- mation about its author and how best to contact him or her. By enriching such documents with links to the author’s home page the contextual gap between the reader and author is bridged. This leads to the starting of an asynchronous relationship, even before real communication has started.
Building and sustaining momentum
In a company such as BP Amoco, in which empowerment is the norm, it would be very difficult to get people to produce home pages through edict. Mandate would ultimately run the risk of becoming a box-ticking exercise. In order to build and sustain momentum the company actively mounted an awareness cam- paign. The campaign:
● was led by a group of ‘Connect champions’, who came from a variety of backgrounds (geologists, marketers, auditors) and believed strongly in the benefits of a connected organization
● ran a variety of competitions, poster campaigns, desk drops, learning fairs and lunchtime publicity booths. For example, one Connect champion took milk cartons and pasted ‘Wanted’
descriptions. Each one described an employee within Connect, and the challenge was for curious staff to find the people con- cerned
● used promotional pens as token recognition of good practice examples with a personal thank you from the program direc- tor. The director’s note would request and encourage other staff to use Connect, and invariably resulted in further conver- sions.
By these actions BP Amoco was able to engage the hearts and minds of its people, and so produce the behavioural and intel- lectual reflexes necessary for Connect’s success.
Generating content
Generating content for Connect was a fundamental task. One basic problem with this task is that a large number of staff do not feel that they can contribute, or indeed understand the need to.
Staff find it difficult to articulate answers to the question ‘why contact me?’ on an intranet page. Reasons for this can be mani- fold; from shyness and humility to myopic understanding of career progression and how the information will be used. To
overcome these barriers the company ran a programme of desk- side coaching to help people understand the technology and help individuals define what he or she had to offer the company.
While this experiment created good content the company found it difficult to scale up the operation under harsh trading circum- stances. As such, coaching was left to local staff on an informal basis.
The company detected a general pattern in content. Typically the emphasis of the:
● younger staff tended towards qualifications and competences
● mid-career staff towards experience and network affliations
● senior staff towards key relationships, often external to the company.
Keeping content updated
Connect’s answer to the challenge of ensuring that content is reg- ularly updated was to develop a ‘Fifteen Minutes of Fame’ feature that an individual gains when updating their details. On each update a Post-it™ icon would appear on the Connect screen and display the individual’s photograph and details, until they were supplanted by another employee’s update. While this led to fun-filled rivalry for prominence, the serious outcome was that it increased the likelihood of current and relevant informa- tion.
Likely future developments for Connect
There are plans to add new dimensions of communication to enhance Connect’s capability. The long-term future of Connect depends on its ability to create and sustain strong relationships through building trust. Theory suggests that words constitute only 7 per cent of the message, 38 per cent is in the voice and 55 per cent in body language in any single episode of conversation.
Currently, only word communication is possible. The future vision is to add further dimensions, by taking advantage of new multimedia technologies such as video clips.
Another challenge BP Amoco is addressing is that of immedi- acy, or how quickly can a user move from a vague request for expert help to a face-to-face encounter. BP Amoco aims to achieve this in three clicks: ‘find me’, ‘see and hear me’, ‘now meet me’.