The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 4th Edition

12.2. Knowledge Management for a Small Consulting Firm

Overview. A senior professor who has done part-time consulting for many years is very pleased when his latest book becomes a best-seller and he is inundated with new consulting opportunities. He decides to take a two-year leave of absence from his university to start a small consulting firm with several of his current and former graduate students as his junior consulting partners.

An organizing system for knowledge management is required, but what gets designed will depend on the scoping decision. Is the goal of the system to support the consulting business, or also to support ongoing and future research projects that sooner or later will generate the consulting opportunities?

What is being organized? The professor concludes that since his consulting is based on his research, he needs to include in the new knowledge management system his research articles and the raw and analyzed data that is discussed in the articles. These resources are already organized to a great extent according to the research project that led to their creation. These have been kept in the professor’s university office.

The professor also has a separate collection of consulting proposals, client reports, and presentations that he has made at client firms. Because of restrictive university rules about faculty consulting, the professor has always kept these resources in his home office rather than on campus.649[Law]

In addition to these existing resource types, ...