SAS has a knowledge repository called ToolPool with loads of useful tips, tricks, and technical papers. An open culture, CEO support, human flexibility, responsiveness, internal marketing, commitment, and scalable technical infrastructure are important components of SAS' KM success.

Siemens Information and Communication Networks (ICN) devised a business development KM practice called ShareNet in 1999 to help share project knowledge across technologies and markets in different stages of maturity. Sales staff now find themselves playing the role of strategy-management consultants who have to be able to interpret trends and design new opportunities together with the customer. ShareNet helps tap and share local innovation in different parts of the world via project debriefings, manuals, codified databases, structured questionnaires, chat rooms, and hot lines. Technically based on OpenText's LiveLink, it is used by 7,000 sales and marketing staff.

Digital KM platforms can have a transformative power in environments where paper and face-to-face meetings constitute the bulk of knowledge transfer, as was the case when the Sun Microsystems Philippines (SunPhil) joint venture was formed between Sun Microsystems and erstwhile distributor Philippine Systems Products in 1999. Sun technology was used to launch the SunPhil Corporate Portal and its Knowledge Management System, with features like document rating, profiling and filtered search, and collaborative authoring. The time taken to prepare proposals and project documentation has been reduced tremendously, and innovative approaches are being explored to harness information mobilization and real-time expert contact via Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) and Short Messaging Service (SMS) (the Philippines, after all, is the world's SMS capital).

Architecturally, KM at Unisys is facilitated via the Knowledge.Net portal and Ask Knowledge.Net expertise location management application. Capacity building exercises like the KM@Unisys introductory e-learning course are available through Unisys University.

Xerox's Eureka practice for sales engineers is credited with solving over 350,000 problems annually with savings in excess of $15 million a year. Its Code Exchange initiative (CodeX) has now grown to over 1,000 registered users and saves over $3 million annually in software-license fees, servers, and other infrastructure costs.

Source: Data from Rao, 2005.