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Opinion: Knowledge management needs serious consideration

"In future the successful firm will be the one that knows and understands its core client base and has identified the core services it wants to provide - and then does so efficiently and cost-effectively." You'll have to excuse my sarcasm when I suggest that, excepting for the extraordinary market conditions such as those prevalent today, most firms have tried to do exactly this in both the near past and the present with some degree of success. This is hardly rocket science and it largely disconnected with the prior thrust of the article. Most firms in my experience make a point of trying to understand their clients businesses to some degree (and note that there is a limit; you don't have to be a supermarket to help them lease the land for one). Furthermore, market pressures around pricing and delivery timescales ensure that firms look periodically at working practices to ensure both best practice and to take advantage of advances in other spheres such as technological ones. "The firm that succeeds in revitalising and ­refocusing its KM function will give itself a real edge." Here we part company totally. Any advantages gained would be short-lived, but the experimental nature of the task involved may well have negative repercussions that haven't even been considered. My advice is to stop trying to find a role for these expensive systems and non-coal-facing lawyers and return to a more basic way of establishing information: ask. If you want to know what your client thinks about something, ask them. Systems are not substitutes for client interaction and systems are not short-cuts to retaining relationships with clients that can take years to grow. What KM systems are, however, is symptomatic of the industry's relentless attempts to boil the useful-but-non-measurable down to the useless-but-measurable.

24-Nov-2009

4:10 am