OKLC 2004

I will be leaving Wednesday for the OKLC 2004 conference in beautiful Austria... Unfortunately I couldnt find a comprehensive listing of speakers like last year but this page at least this gives a good overview on who is involved.

Overview on articles by Gottschalk

Petter Gottschalk, whose article "Information technology support for interorganizational knowledge transfer: An empirical study of law firms in Norway and Australia in the Information Resources Management Journal (Hershey: Jan-Mar 2003. Vol. 16, Iss. 1; p. 14) I found very interesting sent me a link to his website which lists all his publications.

I guess I will go through his articles one by one as I found the ones I have seen so far particularly useful and insightful on the topic law firms & KM.

Old article but still true...

I came across an article from the Financial Times from 8/11/1999: "Lessons from professional services firms" by Laura Empson. I didnt see the date first but when I saw that Anderson consulting was referred to as a model for others I had to check the date...

However there is some very simple and good thruth in the article where it talks about KM in professional service firms:

In accredited professions like engineering and architecture, all members share a common body of codified knowledge acquired through professional training. A large part of their competitive advantage, therefore, derives from possessing a unique base of expertise.

Traditionally, professional services firms have been regarded as organisations of highly trained, extremely clever technical specialists, who apply their esoteric knowledge to the creation of innovative and sophisticated solutions of clients' complex problems. It is certainly true that some firms operate successfully in this way. However, in reality there are not that many extremely clever people to go round and most clients' problems are not that sophisticated.

As a result, most highly expert professional services firms remain small and specialised "boutiques". Firms such as McKinsey would like us to believe that they are exceptions to this rule. But such claims should always be treated with caution.

A professional services firm wishing to grow large must learn to codify the esoteric and tacit knowledge accumulated within experienced staff and disseminate this throughout its organisational structure. If this knowledge can be expressed in terms of established procedures and applied to a wide range of client problems, the potential for leverage increases. Codification relaxes some of the more stringent constraints of the apprenticeship model of knowledge transfer. Increasing the number of juniors supervised by a senior professional increases the degree of leverage and, therefore, profitability.

Another thing that would interest me is how these figures look today or if they have changed significantly over the last 5 years:

According to statistics from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the professional services sector accounts for 17 per cent of all employment in the US and major western European countries. The sector has enjoyed annual growth of 15 per cent in revenue terms over recent years. PwC, the accountancy firm for example, is now the single largest recruiter from UK universities. With 155,000 professional staff worldwide and annual revenues of $15bn, PwC, if publicly quoted, would qualify as a Fortune 100 company.

Basic definitions

In Using Knowledge Structure Maps as a Foundation for Knowledge Management some interesting definitions can be found (I am currently working on the literature review for my thesis...).

An interesting one is in the very beginning of the article, which reflects that knowledge can't be captured as it only exists in people's heads as opposed to a knowledge resource:

A responsible definition of knowledge would reflect the point that knowledge is something that rests in people's heads. Knowledge relates to knowing things. Books and documents cannot know things and at present, neither can computers. It is true that books, documents, web sties etc can be a source of knowledge when people interact with them; however, they are not knowledge in themselves.

A (more focused) knowledge resource must therefore be something that an organisation accesses, develops and manages through its staff. This means that an organisation possesses a knowledge resource that is potentially mobile, comes equipped with an in built mechanism for applying knowledge and can be supplemented at source by problem solving and decision making capabilities that integrate fully with the knowledge resource at all times.