Note that even in many other kinds of professional firms, these
factors are not present to the same degree as in the particular exam-
ple of strategy consulting. Law firms, for example, have generally
not been successful in using knowledge management to reduce
duplication of efforts in research and memo writing. Firms that
develop custom software applications have struggled to realize full
potential from cataloguing and reusing elements of code. Based on
our experience in companies in many different industries, we
believe that successes of the codification-access model result from
a coincidence of many enabling conditions. These successes are
very much exceptions.
Five Promising Approaches to Managing KnowledgeMuch of the momentum behind the knowledge management
movement comes from the fact that we all believe that (1) people
will perform better if they can learn things that other people in a
company know and (2) the incremental performance is potentially
significant enough that companies should not leave this learning to
chance. These claims are undeniably true. They do not, however,
imply that companies should extract knowledge, codify that knowl-
edge, put it into systems, and encourage people to search those sys-
tems to access and act on the relevant nuggets. The metaphor of
“managing knowledge” and the codification-access model that it has
spawned have in fact distracted attention from other promising
approaches to acting on the opportunity that we all sense arises from
(1) and (2). Consequently, we would like to lay out what we believe
are five ideas that have been underappreciated, given many practi-
tioners’ reflexive focus on the codification-access model.
Expanding the Boundaries of Automation
Where it is possible to automate knowledge work fully, there are
tremendous returns to doing so. Certainly there are many instances
in which highly complex tasks have been fully embodied in
WHERE“MANAGINGKNOWLEDGE” GOESWRONG 31