Case Studies in Knowledge Management

Developing, Documenting, and Distributing Learning 25

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annual revenues are $6.9 billion, and the company meets client needs in two principal
categories:

• Risk Management, insurance-broking, and programme-management services are
  provided for businesses, public entities, professional services organisations,
  private clients, and associations under the Marsh name.


• Reinsurance-broking, risk and financing modeling, and associated advisory ser-
  vices are provided to insurance and reinsurance companies, principally under the
  Guy Carpenter name.

The organisation is made up of distinct divisions with specialist knowledge. One
of the key business drivers for the future is to maintain and develop the specific
knowledge within each of these divisions, while sharing more learning and experiences
across the business, particularly to reduce “reinvention of the wheel” comments across
divisions and geographies.

SETTING THE STAGE

Knowledge Management Platforms in Learning

Newman (1991) defines KM as “the collection of processes that govern the creation,
dissemination, and utilization of knowledge.” The cascade and consistent communica-
tion of corporate goals and performance management is pivotal to business success,
learning interventions, and employees’ personal development. In 2000, Marsh made a
fundamental shift in the mechanism used to cascade company strategy across the globe.
Local performance management tools, processes, and procedures were replaced with one
common approach to aligning goals and consistently measuring performance with the
Balanced Scorecard.^1
At the beginning of 2001, there was no common, pan-European technology platform
specifically targeting learning and the consistent documentation of learning in Marsh.
E-mail provision was the one common tool and platform across the globe. The company
had a variety of software to support the creation and application of databases and had
the capability to share databases across geographies, through shared network drives,
Internet-based secure “filing” programmes, Microsoft Access and Lotus Notes
programmes. Few employees were aware of the range of these capabilities and even fewer
were aware of how to manipulate such tools.
In 2001, the firm implemented a global learning management system with specific,
pan-European capabilities including e-learning, registration for tutor-led learning, and
an online lending library with books, CDs, tapes, videos, and computer-based training
(CBT). The system also provided the capability to record for each learner what learning
they had accessed and to allow an “approver” path for line manager involvement and
alignment to learning. Usage statistics have increased from 11% of the total European
population in 2001 to more than 28% in 2004.
In 2002, the organisation launched a company-wide portal, an interactive client and
colleague platform to source information about Marsh to both external and internal
requestors. The portal is intended to ultimately replace local country-specific intranet