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160 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

currently staffed on. The form requires them to input information about the type of
project, the steps undertaken, the lessons learned and so on. Once this is done, con-
sultants should go to a specific web-page on the KMS and upload the document onto
the system. Before this, however, they are required to supply the metadata that will
allow for the document to be searchable once it is on the system. The metadata to
be input consists of name, date, type of practice, type of service delivered, document
importance and so on. Document importance refers to the value of the document:
consultants can decide to tag a particular document as ‘premium content’. Knowledge
closeouts are not the sole documents that are uploaded. PowerPoint presentations
detailing common frameworks and processes applied throughout projects can be fre-
quently found. Yet, the vast majority of documents are stored and presented from a
project-perspective, as opposed to a topic- or time-perspective. What this means is that
although you can search documents from different angles, when they are retrieved
and downloaded, they always present knowledge in terms of the different steps and
processes undertaken in a project, as dictated by the knowledge closeout template.
In terms of the demand side, consultants can go on the home page of the KMS and
use the search facility to search for relevant articles. The site is tailored to the specific
characteristics of the organization and allows consultants to perform searches according
to authors (i.e. director who led the project), client type, practice areas, service areas and
industry type. For instance, if you go into the industry areas and click on electronics and
computing, then the KMS will display the titles of all the documents that pertain to that
industry sector in order of importance (i.e. premium content is displayed first). Alterna-
tively, if the consultant searches for a particular keyword, such as ‘product development’,
the KMS will retrieve all the documents that have metadata matching that keyword.
There is also a special section termed the ‘People Section’ on the KMS, which does
not possess content related to projects. Instead, it allows searching for the profiles of
other consultants. Such profiles usually contain information on the education of the
consultant, her/his work undertaken prior to joining the company, and the types of
projects she/he has been involved in with the management consultancy so far.
The KM team is responsible for monitoring and fostering the use of the KMS. They
publish a monthly KM report, which gives an overview of metrics aimed at assessing
the performance of the KMS and the use made of it by consultants. Metrics most
commonly used include number of monthly searches undertaken, number of monthly
searchers and so on. These reports show that of the 600 consultants, about two-thirds
use the KMS and most of the searches are directed to the ‘People Section’.

Factors affecting the KMS use

Access: Most of the time, consultants are either on the road or on a client site. Only
rarely do they come to the office. This forces them to access the KMS from the client
location or over a wireless connection. The problems with this are threefold: first, the
procedure is highly cumbersome; secondly, the connection is much slower; thirdly,
the client may not always grant the consultants access to their network:
So, the big challenge we have is that as we try to keep the system secure we have
to have some safeguards as to accessibility. On the flipside our ability to access the

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