Digital White Papers

42 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT What Legal KM Professionals Can Learn from KM in the Big Four KM was generally operationalized in major streams of research and content creation, technology assessment and implementation, adoption and change management. KM was run as a strategic enabler for the Audit, Advisory and Tax practices. Research and Content Creation KM teams in the Big Four have a major focus on research. Secondary research was conducted for business development while primary research was conducted for the firm's thought leadership. At EY the team in India conducted much of this research. They engaged in projects such as creating snapshots of 100 public company CEOs in advance of a large meeting, writing reports for practice and industry team consumption, and contributing to thought leadership papers and survey results. In addition to research, Big Four firms have always had a strong focus on account management. At EY a third of KM team members were assigned to monitor key client accounts. Even though the lead partners on those accounts knew a great deal about these major clients, the team added value by researching news about the company in other geographies, spoing trends and connecting the dots. They actively engaged with partners to ask what they were learning about the client and captured that learning for the benefit of the firm. At any given time, a large global account could have 100-200 EY team members working on it in one geography, so it was vital to connect the dots for such large client relationships. Client insights were continually gathered into reports and toolkits and disseminated via the intranet. Intranets were generally content dense, sometimes multi-lingual for the major markets and included pages for practices, industries, geographic regions, competitors, clients and larger business trends. Technology and Social Collaboration The KM team was also responsible for rolling out new technologies and platforms across the firm. The innovation and strategic initiatives groups worked closely with their KM peers to identify and address service line improvements and emerging business trends. Then the KM technology implementation team took on the daunting challenge of planning and executing multi-country implementations that could expand to over 145 countries. A related but separate team focused on the adoption and change management necessary for such large rollouts. This included training, internal marketing and communications to ensure that any new program had swi and ongoing adoption. All Big Four firms have made heavy use of internal and external collaboration workspaces using SharePoint and other collaboration soware. They use collaboration tools to enable threaded discussions in community-based groups and facilitate people and biography searches. These tools are helpful especially for new professionals needing to get to know their firm beer. Agnihotri concedes that it was a struggle to get billable client-facing professionals even to keep their bios updated on the tool, but said that incentives tied to performance reviews boosted participation. Social collaboration tools helped break the otherwise naturally occurring silos of geographical boundaries, practice groups and service lines. Through these technologies, it was possible for someone in New York to post a question, get a response from someone in Amsterdam and then connect them both with a third person in Dallas who had the answer. Having social collaboration tools in their arsenal clearly helped combat the challenges of a large matrixed organization with geographically dispersed resources. KM actively engaged with partners to ask what they were learning about the client and captured that learning for the benefit of the firm.

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