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Communities, Knowledge Management, and More...

SAP Collaboration Projects

 

Locating and Linking Experts – A Knowledge Management Approach at Aventis Pharma

By Drs. Jürgen Oldigs-Kerber & Stephen Sorensen, Aventis – 09/12/2002

German Version

With approximately three billion Euro at hand, Aventis Pharma funds one of the largest research and development budgets for prescription drugs in the pharmaceutical branch. In the pharmaceutical industry, the development of a drug, from identifying the active ingredient to approval can take ten to 15 years. A substance with average to good profitability (for example, €365 million per year) generates an average of one million Euro each day.

Saving even the smallest amount of time in the development phase is important because these savings mean higher sales revenues and contribute to refinancing innovative research. The approach taken by Aventis is to not only support people in accessing the right information at the right time, but also give others access to those who carry the knowledge. This is especially valuable when various experts in different areas work or have worked on similar problems. Furthermore, redundancy can be avoided, productivity can be improved, and when knowledge is exchanged internally companies no longer have to invest in external experts.

 

The Internal Knowledge Management Approach

At Aventis Drug Innovation and Approval the Knowledge Managers have agreed on a practical definition for the term Knowledge Management. "Knowledge Management is the systematic effort to promote connectivity between people and to facilitate the creation, sharing, and use of knowledge to gain competitive advantage." (KM Global Meeting, Feb. 2, 2001)

Aventis focuses on the principle of employee willingness for global knowledge exchange. The individual as a knowledge carrier is thereby the central focus of Knowledge Management activities. Locating and linking experts plays an important part (Expertise Location Management). The individual employee becomes the center of interest. The goal is to closely link the various knowledge carriers, in order to use existing knowledge more effectively. The tacit knowledge of the knowledge carrier is identified by analysing the explicit knowledge in emails and other documents. This knowledge is both implicit and explicit.

The just-in-time availability of knowledge carriers (locating and linking) is growing in meaning and has a greater use compared to the set-up of "knowledge warehouses", for example, documents in databases such as "Lessons Learned", interviews with experts, debriefing papers, and so on.

The approach emphasizes quick availability and efficient diffusion of expertise, when needed. Preliminary time-intensive documentation is not required in this case, enabling information to be shared as soon as it is needed. Diffusing (networking) the required knowledge as quickly as possible fulfills the high demand for knowledge by the company. In all three aspects of this approach – knowledge generation, knowledge retention, and knowledge transfer – the knowledge carrier stands in the foreground.

Leaning on North, Romhardt & Probst 2001 the implementation of Knowledge Management solutions orients itself to the following three strategic areas:

 

Nimbus/Focus-Modell

Figure 1: The Involvement of Knowledge Management in Business Processes (altered according to North, Romhardt & Probst 2001: www.cck.uni-kl.de/wmk > papers

Next to the expansion of IT infrastructure, solutions are consciously differentiated between those that address the individual employee (human capital), and those that aim to support a collaborative meshwork of interactive people (social capital).

The demands on the implementation of new solutions and the buy-in by employees are considered more difficult for solutions that address the social capital branch, because they change the way employees work and are accepted only once a censorious mass of users uses the new solution.

Taking all of this into consideration, Aventis decided to incrementally expand Expertise Location Management first by passively profiling the individual expertise of all employees, thereby providing access to experts.

 

Passive Expertise Ascertainment (Profiling)

There are basically two approaches for Expertise Location Management. One approach is the creation of a search system of high precision using controlled vocabulary consisting of a taxonomy of terms maintained explicitly for this purpose. However, such a system would not meet the requirements of the ever-changing, fast-paced terminology and topics in pharmaceutical R&D. It is questionable how often such a system would be used because it must be continually maintained by central content administrators and by each employee for his or her own expert profile.

Thus, passive profiling in the form of unstructured information, such as documents or e-mails, proves to be the better solution. This method supports the creation of any number of semantical search domains and a dynamic (fluid) number of terms.

The expert profile is then generated in an automated manner by analyzing such texts, along with a description of the job profile in the employee's own words. The profile is based on terms automatically extracted from the documents and then linked to the expert's name. The expert has complete control over whether and to what degree the profile can be viewed by others. The expert profile also consists of a private part (private profile), which can be researched anonymously with guaranteed data protection and the expert – as a quasi-unknown person – can be contacted via the software.

The advantages of such an approach are summarized below:

 

The Planned Organizational Change

Implementing the Knowledge Management approach of "locating and linking experts" can in some ways change the way in which employees work considerably. Among others, the following requests are made of the employees:

This is especially the case when people come in contact with others they have never seen or met before. Implementation of the Knowledge Management approach occurred using the organization model of Porras & Robertson (1992, 738) for planned change in an organization.

Model of Porras & Robertson, 1992

Figure 2: Overview of model by Porras and Robertson (1992); click image for larger version

Dividing the working environment into four organizational subsystems helps to form the approach in a holistic way. The four subsystems, in which changes can be initiated and supported, are:

This organizational model for planned organizational change describes concrete approaches for making changes, with the goal of influencing on-the-job behavior of employees in a positive way. When implementing the Expertise Location Management solution, the various perspectives (work setting) were taken into consideration and specifically designed. A comprehensive project plan, which also orients itself to this outline in terms of its strategic goals, can be used as an instrument for controlling projects.

 

User Experiences and Business Value

To evaluate the quality of the solution over 400 of the first users from the USA, France, and Germany were questioned (32 percent responded) in November and December of 2001. The majority of those questioned (62%) had already been actively using the system (had made a search request) at this point in time. Sixty-eight percent of the active users assessed the search results as partially relevant or very relevant.

Typical needs with which the employees approached the system were:

Those questioned named the following advantages most often:

75% of those questioned would recommend the tool to their co-workers.

Chart with loyalty dataChart with commitment data

Figure 3: Charts with loyalty and commitment data

 

Business Benefits

Users reported on their experiences via e-mail or in personal interviews. The validated data was used to determine how useful the solution is. A conservative estimate was included when calculating the business benefits, and therefore only 10 of 22 reports were taken into consideration.

An Example

The following is an example of a collected feedback report: John and his team in the USA were looking for a specific verification method. Creating the method using similar publications was unsuccessful. John used the Expertise Locator to determine whether there were Aventis employees who already had experience with this type of analysis. On the next day he received an answer from a specialist in Japan who had already collected similar experience in this area. The co-worker informed John of an error in the article and offered hints for a solution. This invaluable information saved the team two months of work, which would have been otherwise required to start their own development.

Calculating the Business Benefits

The business benefits were calculated by multiplying the amount of time saved by the user (reported by the user) with the average internal daily rate. No other use (sequelae such as faster market entry, reducing the project duration thereby increasing sales revenue and competitive advantage) were calculated.

The time saved amounted to 6.4 months over a three-month period of usage time for 435 users. The optimistic value was 12.9 months. The indices should make it clear that there is justified hope that this approach can increase productivity, saving a considerable amount of time. It is also clear that even if the positive attitude towards this approach does not remain forever, a noticeable effect remains.

 

Summary of Results

Our Knowledge Management approach "Locate and Link Experts" (building networks) proved considerably successful as early as in the first evaluation phase (December 2001, that is three months after implementing the software). It showed that:

 

References

 

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