Worawan Wanwil

Case: Knowledge Management at Katzenbach Partners

Katzenbach Partners LLC is a management consulting firm. The firm’s competitive advantage is its people, their knowledge and experience. The firm’s growth presented Katzenbach with both organizational and technical challenges to their knowledge management approach.

In order to tackle those challenges, Katzenbach came up with a knowledge management solution using Enterprise 2.0 technologies integrated into their, The HUB, intranet site.  A hybrid approach of formal and informal document classification was used. The formal approach involved classifying documents in a predefined way.  The informal approach involved using tags where anyone in the firm could tag a document in a way that was most useful to them.  All tags were public to the firm so one document could be tagged by multiple users allowing for a much more complete picture of the document’s  contents than if its tags were only generated by the author.

Community of Practice

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly either in formal or informal way. In order to get a successful community of practice, there are factors needed to be concerned. Since Members of communities of practice are thought to be more efficient and effective conduits of information and experiences, Individuals in communities of practice play an essential role in sharing information. Communicating with others in a community of practice involves creating social presence – It is believed that social presence affects how likely an individual is of participating in a community of practice (especially in online environments). Motivation to share knowledge is critical to success in communities of practice. Also, motivation to share knowledge and collaboration are critical to success in communities of practice.