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AIS is a small to medium sized consultancy composed of 120…
AIS is a small to medium sized consultancy composed of 120 specialists in information
management advisory services working across the Australian and New Zealand
seaboard. The company provides advisory services in digital content management,
information audit and mapping, information management and business intelligence. It
assists organisations in managing their legal compliance obligations and risk
management activities associated with information management. AIS services are
designed to assist their clients in strategic readiness and the effective and productive
use of information. AIS has been in operation for 15 years. It has grown slowly and
concentrated on building up a constant client base. In recent years it has extended
beyond its initial market in Australia and New Zealand and now has small offices in
Singapore (12 consultants and support staff) and Hong Kong (14 consultants and
support staff). Counting all support staff, the company has over 250 personnel including
120 consultants. It has offices in all Australian capital cities and in Auckland and
Wellington, New Zealand. Head Office is in Melbourne.
AIS personnel are highly trained, result oriented consultants with a unique range of
skills brought together to help fulfil a unique market position for AIS. The company
relies on its team being self-motivated and interested knowledge workers who go that
‘extra mile’ to ensure they are across their area of expertise. They are typically young urban professions. The average consultant age is currently 34, the youngest is 25 and the senior partner is 58. There are more men them women in the company, but the ratio is almost 50:50, of 120 consultants 62 are men and 58 women.
Management of information resources within the organisation is of a high quality but
unfortunately this consultancy is a classic example of ‘the cobbler’s children having no
shoes’, knowledge sharing has remained mostly uncoordinated and informal as this
outfit has grown; staff share internal directories for all forms and documents that they
need access to and keep most of the material they need to work with on their own
desktop computers and laptops. There is an internal email listserv where emails can be
posted on different subjects. Staff can also distribute email directly, and a weekly
newsletter is also distributed by email. Most knowledge exchange around the
organisation happens in person, sometimes facilitated by training seminars. The focus
of information and knowledge exchange within AIS has until now been managed
primarily by the Corporate Library and Research Service (CLRS) based in Melbourne.
The Senior Research Manager of CLRS, Anne Marie Schwarzenegger, and her two full
time assistant information officers, Jack Russell and Sally Weaver, run a tight ship in
managing the CLRS. Jack has a computer science Degree and is a Web and social media
enthusiast who, for the last 5 years, has managed the distribution of AIS digital
knowledge assets around the organisation. Jack maintains the corporate wiki
and, with assistance from IT services, manages the staff portal underlying the wiki: a
space where he can present news items and links to standards, worksheets, training
documents and similar assets that consultants need for their tasks. Use of the staff
portal and wiki has never been very high, although Consultants are encouraged to add
resources directly, Jack has found that they tend to work with the resources they know
and need and little more. They do occasionally revisit the portal to update information
in it, but there are no incentives in place, so little happens other than this occasional
use.
As the company has grown consultants in regional offices seem happiest just to work
with their own information resources and by contacting Anne Marie Schwarzenegger
directly when they have specific needs. However, the knowledge required by AIS
consultants changes rapidly and the way things are could be improved. While
AIS has been refreshing its product offerings as it grows, innovation in product and
service offerings hasn’t happened in years. Furthermore, as AIS has grown, so too has
staff turnover increased. The company is now eager to facilitate a better pathway to
knowledge sharing throughout its regions and has been planning to implement a new
revised and revised approach to KM that staff will actually use.
Following a recent executive planning day, AIS has decided to green light funding for a
new approach to KM that will be underpinned by a new consultancy offering that AIS is
developing for its clients: with growing concerns about privacy on the Internet and
inside most of their client companies, AIS have decided to commence offering Privacy
Audit services, alongside its other audit offerings, to support their clients with better
standards and approaches to achieving sound privacy management.
AIS’s Corporate Library and Research Services is leading the development of a new KM
solution that the Consultants will use internally to develop, build and share information
and knowledge about how to go about privacy auditing with each other. The plan is to
provide access to information about key concepts in privacy audit, news items, market
trends current awareness pieces, and other relevant resources (like privacy audit tools
and standards) for Consultants to work with. The company is hopeful that the right KM
solution will become a platform for creating, storing, sharing and using knowledge, not
only about Privacy and Privacy Audit, but in general for an invigorated consultancy team
offering innovative solutions in the field. At this stage everything is on the table, AIS is
interested in the inclusion of options for personalisation and the transfer of tacit
knowledge: including a better understanding of the role that an internal expert
directory might play, options for a community of practice for consultants interested in
this area, and the role that enterprise collaboration and crowdsourcing solutions might
serve at AIS. They are also interested in how codification and similar approaches to
explicit knowledge transfer might work to provide a searchable Knowledge base,
e.g., what the role for KM applications and tools supporting better business data
analytics and insight might be.
The Corporate Library and Research team has been charged with preparing a reporting
explaining and offering a combination both, new tacit and explicit knowledge
management solutions for AIS and have asked that you (in this role) prepare a briefing
paper and roadmap for the design of a Knowledge service solution at a forthcoming
meeting of AIS Board of Directors and Executive Management team. They have asked
that your solution be realistic and presented in the context of AIS’s new product service
offering of Privacy Audit consultancy. To achieve its business objective AIS’s knowledge
in the Privacy management space must be second to none.
1. What is the current state of KM at AIS?
2. What are the KM Challenges and issues confronting AIS?
3. What is the main purpose of the KM and Analytics service solution you are prosing?
4. What are the strategic imperatives, drivers, and vision for the new solution?
5. Who are the main users and what will they use the service for?
