Then we posted the electronic versions of these documents in
a database, organized loosely in subject areas that we hoped would
make sense to the consultants. In knowledge management, we call
these subject areas the taxonomyor classification scheme.
While we were worrying about how to restrict access to confi-
dential client information, one of the global practice leaders dis-
tributed a computer disk worldwide of his practice’s entire content.
He was quickly elevated to hero status by his practice for circum-
venting network connection and bandwidth constraints in getting
his people content they could use (especially outside the United
States).
The epiphany that was associated with this “bootleg CD” caused
us to create a more robust firmwide intranet so that people could
find documents and then to acquire a document management sys-
tem to manage our growing document inventory. This evolution
from capturing documents to organizing documents to storing doc-
uments was fairly typical for management consulting firms.
One of the side roads we went down was figuring out how to
“mine” the content of a PowerPoint document, since a single doc-
ument could require minutes to download. Imagine searching for a
problem-solving approach that worked in the past and trying to
find it among twenty-five PowerPoint documents at slow connec-
tion speeds. So we split the content into “nuggets” of knowledge,
naming them things like “techniques,” “tools,” “methodologies,”
and “plans,” and we tried to put enough context around each
nugget to make it meaningful and searchable by others. Although
we could declare victory on “nuggetizing” the knowledge embed-
ded in large PowerPoint documents, it was clear that the work
MAKINGKNOWLEDGEMOVE 233Tip:When creating these classification schemes, ask people who
will be looking for the documents where they would expect to find
them. Then go with their first choice. Overengineered taxonomies
make it hard to find things and are terribly difficult to maintain.