KIKK (Knowledge Management for Internal Communication and Customer relations) is a collaborative project between InterMedia, University of Oslo and Safran Software Solutions AS. Safran Software Solutions AS is located in Oslo and Stavanger, Norway. The company’s core business is to develop software solutions for project planning and management, and provide consultancy services in project management. The project planning software was originally developed to support management of complex projects in the offshore industry that needed to meet tight deadlines and help coordinate complex activities involving many project partners. Consultancy includes activities to identify new potential customers, answering requests regarding the products, maintaining good relationships with existing customers. The requests may vary from customer to customer.

The last years, the company has grown in terms of customers, employees and services during the last years, their portfolio of products and services expands and has been introduced to new market segments, especially construction and public management. To company’s suite of project management software is developed from one application and customized to meet the needs of different customers, different purposes and uses. The company collaborate with Microsoft because their software is as a plug-in that integrates with Microsoft Project. To support company growth and transition to new marked segments, they have in collaboration with InterMedia started to develop a web-portal to serve as a front end to a new CRM system. The portal is modelled after their internal information flow, especially for new employees, so that it will improve communication and collaboration with customers, as well as to systematize the customers’ experiences and to alleviate the currently tedious work of responding to an increasing amount of customer requests. 

Research focus – questions

The case study’s research and development proceed along 3 axes:

1. Product evolution – how their suite of software applications for project management develops, and how customers’ input and experiences contributes to customizing and new features in the software
2. How mentoring and introduction of new employees plays out, and exemplifies vertical dimensions of boundary crossing
3. Knowledge management, and how the company’s expertise is shared with their customers and with us as researchers.

Significance of the case study

As a case study for KP-Lab, this study is designed as a longitudinal study (2006 – 2008). It is partly a descriptive – exploratory and historical analysis of evolving knowledge practices with existing and new tools, and an interventionist perspective related to participation in design and implementation of their new Customer Relation Management (CRM) tool.
The CRM tool is part of the company’s on-going web portal development. The web portal will be a front end (user interface) to the CRM system to provide a shared resource for information and communication in the company and with the company’s customers. The web portal will support their communication with customers, and the CRM tool will complement, systematize and formalize the flow of information. For example, in handling improvement requests (as a departure from current oral practice), they want to make user-participation more visible and systematize user-input to development of their suite of project management tools.

We plan to explore and explicate the company’s experiences and existing schemes for knowledge representations, and engage in collaborative interaction to design and study the introduction of the new web-portal. We will explore the interplay of knowledge advancement, innovative technology development (product evolution) and knowledge practices in this context. Furthermore, we plan to explore the company’s expertise in the area of project management software for the oil, gas and building industry (at least one of those areas).