Following a merger, a global pharmaceutical organization came to the realization that it had subject matter experts in drug manufacturing all over the world. These people did not know one another and had no mechanisms for collaboration and problem-solving, however, their shared knowledge was critical to reducing cost and effort associated with manufacturing operations.
The client’s goal was to identify the most critical areas of manufacturing and create a culture and capability to encourage problem-solving and collaboration. This would, in turn, reduce costs associated with specific types of manufacturing problems encountered by teams across the globe.
By combining the client’s commitment to knowledge management and its own mature model for “community enablement,” CGI helped to create a repeatable model for a community of practice that involved working with teams to identify specific technical areas to address, and guiding a setup team through the process of creating and implementing a problem-solving community.
This included a focus on roles, behaviors, configuration of supporting technologies (one that offers message boards, micro-blogging, wikis, and document storage — in this case SharePoint was chosen) and best practices for capture of ideas to solve problems, so those ideas can be re-used and searched.
The value was in the process of enabling a team, and the team adopting behaviors and roles that help to change the email-centric, tacit model of collaboration to a collaborative, knowledge capture model of collaboration.
