Leveraging Intellectual Capital in a Professional Services Firm: Representing and Managing Knowledge for Competitive Advantage

This paper outlines a qualitative case study undertaken to assist a global engineering consultancy to develop a knowledge management strategy. The research is based on interviews with 34 senior members of the firm and highlights the disparate views and definitions of knowledge management which make any knowledge management strategy difficult to implement. A Community of Practice (CoP) perspective is employed to explain the differences of interpretation in this multidisciplinary engineering firm and to suggest ways in which firm knowledge may be employed both strategically and for innovation. It points to a variety of problems with capturing and disseminating knowledge and using it for competitive advantage. The case also highlights the relatively sophisticated views of knowledge held by professionals who go beyond the desire to codify explicit knowledge, to seeing the creation and use of knowledge as implicated in professional identities, organisational history and culture and the social structure of the firm. This case also reveals the epistemic barriers to sharing practice and knowing and the culturally defined modes of learning and sharing knowledge which make explicit and codified knowledge not easily leveraged and distributed globally. The paper goes on to discuss the ontologically fluid nature of knowledge within professional services firms (PSFs) and the implications for knowledge management. The CoP perspective while providing insights into the nature of knowledge generation at the level of practice is found to be less useful in addressing the problem of knowledge dispersal. The findings suggest that contrary to a CoP perspective, the knowledgeability of senior professionals may be an important means of alleviating knowledge stickiness through adopting a brokering role. PSFs are seen to require a variety of knowledge management strategies in which traditional performance measures will be inappropriate. These findings are of relevance to PSFs generally and in particular to those firms for whom innovation and creativity are hallmarks of their reputation.