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162 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

common practice is. They seek to make up for their relative inexperience by acquiring
knowledge about those activities that have been performed for years within the manage-
ment consultancy and which are widely documented and similar throughout projects.
The KMS is not necessarily used to solve a particular problem, but simply to familiarize
and understand what will be required of them and what they are expected to do:
I download typically more than 20 or 30 files, which are related to the topic or the
kind of project we are working on [. . .] . We are addressing similar issues as the ones
addressed in the documents even though they are not exactly the same. So, we use
some of the approaches in the documents to help us. So, we use the documents to
figure out which way is the best to deal with the particular client. [. . .] That helps us
generate some ideas and understand what the traditional way is to approach a client.
MECs, on the other hand, use the KMS much less frequently, mostly because when
they need knowledge it is new knowledge:

If we’ve never done it, it would be really hard to find it, even if we have done
something similar to it, because it would never be tagged appropriately, or no
one would have ever thought about it. So, it is only the second or third time you
are looking for something that you could rely on a system. And I find that most of
the requests you get from people are new things, which we haven’t done yet. You
know, these are things that are on the edge of something. Like you have painted
your room blue before and now you are painting it blue with stripes, but we’ve
never done stripes. I can find something about painting blue, but I have no idea
what to do about the stripes [. . .] .
MECs make much more use of the ‘People Section’ on the KMS and sift through the
backgrounds of other consultants in terms of the projects they have undertaken and
what practice they belong to in order to select people who may help them with the
new knowledge they are looking for:
[. . .] The number 1 reason I go onto KM now is actually to go find people’s profiles
and look at the resumes of consulting staff, for instance for staffing a new project or
get in contact with someone who knows about something I need. And that is a reason
for me to log into the system, access the system, and get familiar with the system.
However, despite its existence, the ‘people section’ was never developed to fulfil this
purpose and does not provide contact details, such as e-mail or phone number.

>> THE KMS AND COLLABORATION
All consultants expressed a strong need for direct collaboration, shedding light upon the
limits of the collaboration capabilities of the current KMS. Even in this instance, however,
consultants diverged in their opinions of what would provide an appropriate direct
collaborative technology. In fact, MECs called for highly interactive and on-demand
collaboration that would address their specific knowledge needs as they surfaced.
LECs, on the other hand, requested more content-based and incremental collaboration
through time, which relied less on human interaction. In fact, LECs seemed to be very
enthusiastic about the possibilities from a wiki as a collaborative tool:

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