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CASE STUDY 7.1

INTERNATIONAL CONSULTANCY

COMPANY (ICC)*

ICC is a medium-sized, private, US-based management consulting company, which
operates out of 16 offices located worldwide in the American, European, Japanese, Chi-
nese and Indian markets. It turns over approximately $250 million per year, employing
around 800 employees, of which approximately 600 are consultants. Its core business
lies in counselling established firms across different industry sectors on how to improve
their operational strategy, and how to achieve product, supply chain, customer experi-
ence and business technology innovations. It claims to differentiate itself from com-
petitors through its focus on implementation, driven by a highly engineering-oriented
workforce and culture. Its client base includes many market-leading companies across a
large variety of industry sectors, including healthcare, government, and electronics and
computing. The company structure is organized geographically with one global manag-
ing director and three regional managing directors, who are respectively in charge of
the Americas, Europe and Asia regions. The rest of the consultants can be classified into
the roles of directors, principals, managers, associates and consultants, sorted in a hierar-
chically descending order. Directors are the owners and shareholders of the company.
The management consultancy grew steadily and reached a size and global span,
which made it difficult to harness the knowledge that was being developed through-
out the organization. Directors recognized that this situation would only worsen over
the years, as plans to expand in new, emerging markets were already under way.
In addition, other management consultancies had already implemented KMS and
it was thought that such technology would be instrumental to stay abreast of the
competition by providing clients with a better service in less time. Hence, in 2003,
the company implemented the SharePoint KMS developed by Microsoft and built a
team of two knowledge managers to handle it.

>> THE KMS AT ICC
The KMS at ICC functions as a repository of documents. In terms of the supply side,
at the end of every project, consultants are encouraged, although never coerced, to
upload what is termed a knowledge closeout. A knowledge closeout is a standard
template document, which consultants fill in with information of the project they are

* This case was authored by Michael Vellat.

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