Accenture Case

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Accenture is one of the world's largest management consultancies, employing over 75,000 people in 48 countries with net revenues in excess of 11.8 billion (Paik & Choi, 2005). The company operates in a highly competitive global business environment with firms such as McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group and, in the area of information technology (IT) outsourcing, competes with companies like IBM, CSC and EDS (Paik & Choi, 2005). As a major global player, Accenture's business environment has also been transformed by contemporary shifts in the global economy. The collapse of the ‘dotcoms' and the economic slowdown associated with 9/11 have created a more challenging environment for management consultancy and as a result Accenture has attempted to evolve their business structure through the use of knowledge management (KM).

Accenture considers knowledge, especially KM, to be a core capability for achieving competitive advantage, spending more than $500 million on IT and staff's over 500 people to facilitate their KM system (Paik & Choi, 2005). Analytical knowledge, or knowledge and intelligence that is drawn from the experiences of particular client assignments, is one of the most important forms of knowledge for the company. Whereas previously this kind of knowledge may simply have been collected and added to a relatively static database or library, Accenture now concentrates on more highly skilled and operationally experienced KM professionals interpreting, assessing and classifying this kind of knowledge (Paik & Choi, 2005).

Traditionally, KM had been sponsored and managed by industry groups, service lines or geographic regions that resulted in a somewhat segregated approach (Smith, 1998). This meant that project teams might be contacted by a number of different KM groups from different business units or regions, often seeking similar or related information. After a number of years of growth, the company soon realized that it had a large but relatively unwieldy set of databases and the next phase involved a long process of editing, refining and reclassifying the knowledge onto the knowledge exchange (KX, Paik & Choi, 2005). The KX is the heart of Accenture's KM program, housing over 7,000 individual data bases that are subdivided into various groups and topics (Paik & Choi, 2005). KX's services provide a constant monitoring of internal clients' usage of, and satisfaction with KM services, customer satisfaction, the volume of repeat customers, past projects and past proposals (Paik & Choi, 2005). The objective of the KX data was to help managers reduce planning time, minimize risk, and improve the quality of the client deliverable products.

Harnessing and adding value to knowledge is one of the key areas where Accenture's KM program has attempted to develop new capabilities. According to the managers surveyed