1. White Paper
Transfer of tacit knowledge with gamification strategies
BY: DANI EL LIOZNYANSKY, MBA, MCITP

2. Transfer of tacit knowledge with gamification strategies
White Paper
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©2015 Zont Group – InformationandKnowledge ManagementCompany
A large oil and gas company has a knowledge leaving issue in its upstream business
areas. This issue is very similar to many other companies where a large percentage of
experienced employees are retiring from the company. The experience that the employees
obtained over the last 20 to 30 plus years at the company is well recorded, but a lot of the tacit
knowledge of special circumstances or best practices were never transferred nor recorded
anywhere in the knowledge bases (KBs) or other written document management systems of the
company. This creates a major information gap between 20/30 year experienced personal and
1 to 7 year experienced personal that are currently rising up the ranks in the upstream
businesses. The overall community of employees that this impacts is over 2,000 people
including geologists, project managers, administrators, drill experts, etc. The company utilizes a
number of information management technologies, but their primary collaboration and non-
critical data document management systemis SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013.
Working with internal Knowledge Management resources we developed technical and
business processes to start recording this tacit knowledge before it left the company forever.
Technology
 Using SharePoint 2013 Community sites we gamified the process
 Developed 8 community sites encompassing wells, administration, geological
area and number of others
 Provide branding around different specialty areas for each community
 Connect the gamification community areas to the collaboration areas hosted on
different SharePoint farm in order to give more context around the
documentation
 Configure special search center dedicated to gamification areas to provide more
relevant and concrete search parameters with results in SharePoint 2013 based
on predefined taxonomy and managed metadata
 Each community site was set-up with a group of SMEs (Subject Matter Experts)
who were the most experienced resources in those areas
 Pre-defined a number of badges levels to show immediate status of various
degrees for people asking and answering questions, creating knowledge articles
on specific topics, contributing to discussions
 Tracking of levels, highest contributors, highest peer reviewed recommendations
for articles, knowledge depth and community participation growth

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©2015 Zont Group – InformationandKnowledge ManagementCompany
Business Process
 Rolled-out the new community sites to the organization with marketing
materials, workshops and ease of use demos
 Present the different badge levels and how they are earned, who receives them
how they presented and how they function
 Provide internal recognition incentives for various milestones:
o Highest points earned in a specific period
o Biggest badge earned
o Most recognitions earned in the long period
o Funny awards: Most inquisitive (those who ask most questions in
discussion boards), Biggest know it all (those who answer most questions
in the discussion boards, this excludes SMEs), Future Novelist (those who
linked to the most to the documents in the collaboration areas)
o SMEs receive awards at the end of a long period for the most points
earned
 Provide monetary/gift cards incentives to the SME’s who have hit a specific
milestones of writing KBs, White Papers, Wiki pages, etc.
 Provide SMEs recognition for most point earned for responding to discussions,
writing articles, contributing to ideas, answering questions, providing feedback,
etc.
Why such elaborate solution?
Outside of document
management, capturing tacit knowledge is not
an easy task. There are several ways to do it
including mentorships and various group
activities. The problem with those is that it
takes a long time and is very small scale
operation, mostly on 1-to-1 to 1-to-3 (1 SME
to 3 mentored) maximum. The experienced
SME’s have their regular full time jobs in
addition to training the next generation of
experts. Plus, this knowledge in most cases

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becomes tacit knowledge of another individual thus repeating the problem. By structuring the
process and technology for easy and any time access of the recorded materials (discussion
boards, Q&A’s, KB Articles, Wiki’s, idea generations, peer reviews, etc.) more people can obtain
the knowledge and become more cross area informed/trained. The information stays in the
written, indexed, searchable, retrievable format on which future training sessions and pivotal
points of information can reside with-in the company for the long term. For the experienced
SMEs, the process becomes less onerous as they can respond at their leisure and write small
papers on their available time without taking up specific chunks of time away from their full
time jobs while knowing that their contributions are visible to everyone to be acknowledged
plus a little friendly competition with their co-workers doesn’t hurt either.