To Support Digital Oil Fields
Authors: Denney Dennis 
Published: February 2015

This article, written by Technology Editor Dennis Denney, contains highlights of paper SPE 99898, "Identifying Future Leaders Through Knowledge Management," by K. Paylow, SPE, A. Hickman, SPE, and D. Zappa, SPE, Halliburton, prepared for the 2006 SPE Intelligent Energy Conference and Exhibition, Amsterdam, 11-13 April.

Simply retaining knowledge within an organization does not ensure its survival unless talented employees are ready to leverage that knowledge. Changing demographics within the petroleum industry raises concerns for the coming decade including the identification, development, and retention of an organization's future leaders. An existing, advanced knowledge-management (KM) community gives an organization's upper management a unique view of key employees' ability and willingness to solve technical problems, communicate, innovate, influence peers, and lead group consensus.

Introduction

A primary reason for failed KM initiatives is that companies do not realize the benefits that can be derived from collaborative KM systems beyond providing a more efficient means for employees to solve problems. An alternative perspective is to use a KM system to identify, evaluate, and develop emerging leaders.

The industry's challenge of recruiting, developing, and retaining a global workforce is well documented and frequently discussed. Charts showing the age distribution within professional organizations, such as SPE (Fig. 1), illustrate that the majority of the industry population is approaching retirement age, and either an insufficient inflow of younger professionals is avail-able or there is too little time to develop younger workers to fill the void left by outgoing personnel. Frequently, these eventual retirees are the most experienced and knowledgeable employees in the organization and will leave with irreplaceable expertise in the form of tacit or undocumented knowledge unless there is a system in place that combines organizational ability to learn, retaining key staff, and making a knowledge-sharing culture a reality.

Knowledge retained by an organization without new capable leadership to leverage that knowledge would never benefit the company. Succession plans can be a first line of defense to ensure that replacement candidates are identified for all key employees. However, even if these programs rely on managers and other key employees from locations wherever the company does business, there is potential for personal bias when asking any key employee to nominate a successor for a role. Better or equally suited candidates unknown to upper management may not be identified.

Another potential drawback may occur when an employee recognized by peers as a "rising star" is nominated by several managers and is placed on several succession plans. As with personal bias, when identifying potential successors, one employee nominated to succeed too many roles is an indication that the organization is not reaching far enough into the employee population to identify a more diverse group of future leaders. If an organization is to survive, it needs to develop strategies to ensure that the best candidates are identified to fill key roles.