Renault did some pioneering work work in the 1980's on Artificial Intelligence and Communities of Practice, moving on to look at competency development during the 1990's. In 2001, they set up a Knowledge Management department, and KM is now one of the company's top 100 strategic issues.

Since starting, they have pursued a mostly people-based approach, and the principal aim in this context is to provide KM support to technical domains to avoid repeating mistakes and help groups better manage their own knowledge. Early on, they identified 80 people as key technical leads they needed to pull together, and they tried to support their work.

Renault made it mandatory to define processes and update knowledge and apply standards in each areas of the company to ensure the validity of knowledge that is being shared. They also used the "baton passing" idea - late stage projects pass on knowledge to new projects.

The current initiative began in 2000, went to protoype in 2001 and launched in 2002. They are now in the process of rolling out the KM programme to 300 technical domains and over 10,000 users.

They have used a combination of approaches:

• top down - disseminating best practice
• horizontal - peer to peer
• bottom up - "employee ideas online" - over 350,000 ideas per year submitted by employtees, which saved a total of 57m Euros in 2002 alone

The KM dept. is mostly project based, with a common lifecycle and structure for most initiatives; they try to use techniques such as problem-driven searches to ensure a practical focus for their work. They depend upon the foundations of clear CMS/DMS policies and try to provide easy-to-use project rooms and other tools for individual teams to use for collaboration.

Overall, the most important thing they have learned is:

1. think global but act local
2. establish a solid foundation of document management policies and collaboration practice