About Us
Knowledge Management at Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, initiated in year 2008. It was initiative embarked by the PETRONAS Education Division in year 2006, before the project handed over to subsidiaries for institutionalising practice of knowledge management.
In 2010 the university are seriously focused on KM practices. Prior to that KM was mostly restricted to content and information management. Currently, UTP is focusing on all efforts towards transferring this tacit knowledge of its staff and making it accessible for future reference and for new workers. Achieving this tacit knowledge sharing pertaining to the various complex processes within the organisations is crucial for the company to reduce costs and become competitive.
As Stephen Birell, marketing director of Vardus, a KM company focusing on the Oil and Gas sector states, “The way the industry can drive down cost is by attacking the areas of huge cost which are facilities and drilling. And if everyone follows best practice and shares their learning, you won’t have people making the same mistakes twice. And that ultimately saves money.” (Chowdury, 2006)
Knowledge management practices are critical to the continued competitive growth of any organisation. In simple terms it facilitates effective reuse of organisational resources which is tantamount to considerable cost savings. Particularly, in a knowledge intensive and high-tech organisation such as PETRONAS, KM practices help to promote better collaboration between multidisciplinary teams.
This could help avoid millions of dollars in costs by helping workers avoid unnecessary delays and repetitive mistakes. The current KM practices involving Communities of Practice (CoP) concepts are showing good acceptance among the staff which is important for effective change management. As more and more staff members are encouraged to participate in KM activities, more intensive KM practices and collaborative platforms could be established.
This would help in realising organisation wide process integration and overall business alignment. However, regular knowledge auditing is the key to understand the flow of knowledge within the organisation and to ascertain areas where improvements could be effected by increasing knowledge sharing. Continued management support is the key as even a small amount of time and resources spent on good KM practices would definitely translate to considerable productivity gains in the longer run.
