Knowledge Management at Scandinavian AirlinesBernhard Rickardsen, Senior vice President Human Resources, SAS
Bernard was born in Norway and served a mandatory military in the Royal NorwegianNavy as a petty officer and instructor in tactical training. He has also previouslyworked in the retail sector and as a Social Worker. He joined Scandinavian Airlinesin 1981 and in 1993 was appointed the Corporate Head of Human Resources and amember of the Management Core. He's the Chairman of the committee responsiblefor People Policies Training and Internal Communications at the Star Alliance. He'sthe Chairman of the Board of the SAS Flight Academy, and a member of the board of the SAS's commuter airline.So we’re reverting to some old technology here, I'm not a technophobe, but at timesI'm a techno bore, which means that I'm so bored about hearing about it so lets see if it works. First a very small lesson in Swedish, what it says he is that the new SASwe changed our livery just last fall, and we're doing our whole change internallywithin our organisation with people, how things look, but mainly the way we work andknowledge management, of course, is an integral part of that. Now when you see allthese colours, what I feel like telling you about here, is that these red engines issomething like engines are not supposed to red, that's sort of dangerous isn't it.While red's a warm heart and blue's a cool head. So I think that is a goodcombination when we talk about knowledge management. The topic of my speech ishard to devolve a culture well, I think that what Lia told us about the way BritishAirways work with this is to ride piggy back on other initiatives. I think that was a verygood way of saying it, because when you try to introduce something like knowledgemanagement, like a conscious way of doing things, I don't think the grand scheme toroll out this big big plan and have top management being very focused on it, that'snot usually the most successful way of doing it. There are lots of initiatives going onin the organisation, if you can pull together those initiatives and try to, as she said,ride piggy back on it, to my experience that's a much more successful way of introducing something that makes people think a ha so that's the way we should lookat that, wow that's a good idea, I could do something over here may be that fits intothe picture. So the culture consists of the thinking, the language and the actual wayof doing things and that's the approach we have taken to knowledge management. Alot of things happen within Scandinavia when it comes to learning and knowledgemanagement. In Denmark, they're going to set up the learning lab, and they havethis ambition of having a world attractive centre for learning, learning about learning,research about learning processes. And the government and business in Denmarkare in on this together. In Sweden Leif Edvinsson who sold a Scandia InsuranceCompany has done pioneering work in how to assess intellectual capital, how tointellectual capital into the annual report of the companies. Of course my owncountry, Norway, who I was interested to see Bruce's number's this morning, 20.5%of Norwegians are internet users on the top of the list. So a lot of things arehappening within our society and what we're trying to do is to draw the best out of that and put it into independent thinking make our own language out of it, and thenputting it into work, both with tools and in the actual way we run our businessprocesses.But first just a few words about my company. We are 22,500 employee, and we had21.5 Million passengers last year, making us the 14
th
largest airline in the world andit's interesting to see here it says passengers, it doesn’t say customers, because wedon't really know how many customers are behind those numbers, so I think we havea some way to go also in our industry.
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