324 Rich and Duchessi
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EPILOGUE
The Manager’s Actions
In late 1999, Ms. Johnson unveiled her plans for creating a sustainable KM program
for SMSI. There were two major threads to her plan. First, she believed that it was
necessary to maintain the KM resource as a source of reliable, solid information. While
the Knowledge Colleagues program had engaged thousands of people in the firm, some
of the materials were not well regarded. Second, she needed to establish the worth of the
program in a formal manner.
To meet the first objective, she revised the Colleagues program’s structure. Starting
in 2000, all new contributions were reviewed by senior managers of the firm to ensure their
applicability and accuracy before they were accepted for distribution. In addition, all the
existing materials were reread for continuing value, with revisions or deletions as
required. A cap of 500 new topics per year was put in place, roughly the same number
of contributions as in the first year of the program. Ms. Johnson felt that this was about
the maximum number of documents that could be adequately reviewed each year.
At first, limiting the number of contributions did increase the quality of the
contributions, as there was now a need to weed out weaker materials. This had a
secondary effect, however, as rejected materials discouraged participation in other
aspects of knowledge sharing among previously enthusiastic junior staff.
The increased emphasis on quality necessarily also increased the workload on the
managers and partners who participated in the Colleagues program. These staff had the
experience and breadth of knowledge to evaluate the usefulness of contributions to the
firm, and their applicability beyond a particular project. The change of their role from
creator to reviewer was unwelcome, and their enthusiasm for the voluntary nature of the
program was shaken. To counter this anticipated shift in collegial spirit, SMSI agreed to
maintain the formal (i.e., financial) recognition for those staff still participating in the
program.
The second goal, establishing the worth of the KM program, remained elusive.
Throughout the program’s introduction, the KM staff was careful to collect any anecdote
about the financial worth of materials obtained through its offices. War stories of projects
working on opposite sides of the globe shared information and materials were dissemi-
nated. A set of user surveys were conducted to ask for estimates of value from users;
these yielded highly suspect results, particularly one that estimated that the KM program
yielded half the net revenue of the firm for 1998. The continuing internal support of the
program was still largely based on the belief that it was working, and that competitors
were doing it as well, rather than concrete value.
Longer-Term Results
The emergent recognition of the need to balance volume of collected knowledge and
maintaining quality and was disrupted by forces outside the control of Ms. Johnson and
the KM staff. The postmillennial slowdown in IT consulting drastically changed the
SMSI workplace, and in turn, the KM program. The initial changes came from a drastic
drop in new project work. As projects completed, there were fewer new assignments, and