18. Knowledge Management and Organisational Performance with a Case Study from PDO

The ability of any organisation to deliver its mandate in the current economically challenging environment requires efficient, robust and sustainably improving performance. The leadership and workforce of Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) are continually adopting business improvement processes backed up by commitments and pledges that are shared across the organisation. Addressing knowledge management (KM) challenges and structures around lessons learned, sharing of best practices, setting up of communities of practice, staff on-boarding, capturing of both tacit and explicit knowledge and so forth are seen as key catalysts for PDO’s sustained and improving performance. An executive-sponsored programme to address these challenges was agreed through KM governance and dedicated KM resources, to address four corporate streams as focus areas.

This chapter demonstrates that the selected streams, namely on-boarding, lessons learned, people skills profiling and communities of practice, have generated tangible benefits in terms of financials, people, business performance and project delivery. The successful implementation of the KM journey is emphasised, starting with the proof of concept and building the culture of knowledge sharing, and consciously creating an enabling environment through leadership, the KM vision, communication, the knowledge team and governance.