A former colleague sent a link (thanks!) to an interview with AW Siew Hong in the Australian Image & Data Manager magazine. He is the Knowledge Management Advisor for Shell Global Solutions (Malaysia). The interview is a page or two of discussion around how Shell Global Solutions (just in Malaysia?) has taken on knowledge management. I particularly like this response to the question of how Shell makes it work.
In Shell we adopt a mantra of ‘Ask-Learn-Share’ to encapsulate what KM stands for: Ask before you do something, Learn while you are doing, and Share later. Simple but effective. I particularly like the mantra, not only because it is catchy but more because it shows that KM is not about having fancy tools but is a behaviourial change. Asking, Learning, and Sharing are all human behaviours. In helping people to share there is no one single magic technique but what works most of the time is the willingness to genuinely understand what the business need is for knowledge sharing within a department or team. Once you get that right the rest will fall into place (most of the time anyway!)
For people who have been in knowledge management or consulting for a while, this should sound familiar. Collison and Parcell's Learning to Fly reported the idea of Learn Before, Learn During, and Learn After. And of course, that is borrowed from the idea of learning loops and after-action-reviews. This particular instantiation, Ask-Learn-Share, modernizes the idea. And from other elements of the interview, it sounds like they are making some use of the Web 2.0 capabilities to help along this "mantra."