Managing Knowledge-How to Do It-A Practical Case Study

Summit Consulting is a business consultancy firm which provides consultancy in the areas of strategic planning, organisational restructuring, strategic deployment of information technology, mergers and acquisitions and so on. As this firm does not produce any goods or services in the conventional sense of the word, the key product is intellectual service and the key asset is intellectual capital or knowledge. This company is a good example of one which will gain tremendous sustainable competitive advantage if it is able to manage its knowledge assets. Knowledge Management Objectives Summit Consulting's Knowledge Management primary objective could be stated as follows: "To provide value to our customers by optimising the use of knowledge within our company. To achieve this, we aim to index and capture knowledge to the maximum extent practical and to ensure that such knowledge is shared and applied to the benefit of our clients and ourselves. Knowledge Management is needed in order to ensure that all consultants are able to share and to learn from each other, and that mistakes made by any one project team are not tepeated by other teams. By having all consultants either knowledgeable or able to find knowledge quickly, they are able to serve customers much better than if learning was left to individuals or individual teams. " The stages inthe Knowledge Cycle explain how knowledge is created and shared on an ongoing basis. (1) Identification of Knowledge Assets As a start, the organisation needs to identity what knowledge is important and where it is held. In other words there is a need to map the organisations existing knowledge. In order for Summit Consultancy to exploit knowledge, it is first necessary to identify its Knowledge Assets. This means identifying what they are (for example, strategic planning tools useful in the oil and gas industry) and where they are (Corporate Strategy Competency Centre in London). The knowledge may be tacit (in someone's head) or explicit (in the form of a document). (2) Knowledge Creation To capture knowledge, one must first know where it is created. Action can then be taken to capture the knowledge. For Summit Consultancy, knowledge is created at the following points: (a) when consultancy teams execute projects for clients, (b) when research teams investigate trends and (c) during planning/brainstorming sessions. We should also recognise that knowledge may also originate from outside the firm, in which case it is more of knowledge sourcing and evaluation rather than creation per se. The position of "Knowledge Scouts" will be established in Summit Consulting and the job role is to search for relevant knowledge from the firm's environment. (This position is already established by at least one IT research and development institute in Singapore). (3) Knowledge Encapsulation Summit Consulting will encapsulate knowledge by (a) indexing sources of knowledge (e.g. people, teams, project documents) and (b) documenting the knowledge. The documentation may be in a Lotus Notes system, or a Knowledge Based System etc. The data will be placed on the corporate intranet. An index may consist of a database with a comprehensive history of all staff members and their expertise etc), projects (which industry, which business area, etc). …