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KNOWLEDGEMANAGEMENTMAGAZINEConsultantsMroPracticendPreachAnswerThinkreliesnKM
odifferentiatetselffromheBig
When Allan Frank and hi s colleague s setout on their own, they
were determined tomake KM central to the approach in theirnew
consulting company and to out-ma-neuver ndustry giants n the
process. Thetraditional Big 5 consulting model was-long
term-playing to lose," according toFrank. "The opportunity was
tremendous."As a formermanagingpartner or KPMG,Frankhadbeendeeply
nvolvedn knowledgemanagement e-velopment t he Big5 flrm,but he
sawadvantagesobuilding a new company
from scratch on a knowl-edge oundation.'A t all the other
firms,knowledge managementcame long after the com-pany wa s
established.Bu twith us yo u cannot sepa-rate the organization
fromMindShare. It's baked intoeverlthing we do, and hasbeen
designed o scale aswe grow," Frank said, refer-ring to the firm's
integralknowledge base. "Here wehave never had a
differentmodel."
Led by Frank, Ted Fer-nandez and Ulysses Knotts,about 50 KPMG
consultantssplit from KPMG two yearsago. They created Answer-Think
Consulting Group inApril of 1997,with head of-fices in Miami and a
corpo-rate structure designed toF':ff,e#.,,..':rfit{.ffi8$ffi
encourage cooperation."We are all equity holders here. No one is in
desperatecompetition to become a partner," said Frank.By the end of
the year,AnswerThink had acquiredfour other consulting firms and
grown to almost 400
employees. I t opened off ices in Atlanta, Boston,Chicago,
Cleveland, Dallas, selin (N.I.), NewYork,Philadelphia and Silicon
Valley.Revenues or 1998wereestimated at $102 million. The company
went publiclast year.The tree of knowledgeAnswerThink describes
tself as "a knowledge-basedconsulting company specializing in
technology-en-abled solutions." Working with vendors such as
Aurum,
Oracle,Vastera and Sun Microsystems, AnswerThink'score
competencies includ e IT strategy, system inte-gration, process
mprovement, and databaseand ap-plication development.
In designing the company's knowledge architecture,Frank, as
chief technology officer, knewwhathe didn'twant. "We don't use
Lotus Notes. It is absolutely then'rong paradigm for knowledge
management," he said."PriceWaterhouseCoopers drank the Lotus Notes
Kool-Aid, and so didAndersen. lVhatwe have here s 10 imesmore
advanced than anything else I have seen."
Basedon a tiered Web architecture and knowledgemanagement
technology from DataWare,MindShareemploys a taxonomy consisting of
six parallel, multi-dimensional information trees.The system s used
toharvest nsights gained from every client project, thenorganize
the knowledge to disseminate best practicemodels and information on
every business and tech-nology challenge he company
encounters."MindShare givesus a thick and ever-growing tree thatis
not separate rom our implementations," said Frank.Sharing the
fruitSo n practice, according to Darrell Pope, director
ofPeopleSoftsolutions for AnswerThink, implementerswaste ess ime on
taskssimilar from one client to an-other. "PeopleSoftdelivers he
guts ofthe application,but there are always signiflcant piecesthat
you have todevelop. For example, once we develop a benefits in
-terface for Fidelity, we can reuse B0 to 90 percent of iton
another engagement.And we can store the designand the actual code
objects n MindShare," he said"I've been at other consulting firms
where we alwaystalked about working'smarter,' but never really
gotaround to it. MindShare was one of the reasons de-cided to move
to AnswerThink," Pope added.
According to Frank, the technology of knowledge-sharing must
always be backed up by a culture ofknowledge-sharing. AnswerThink
rewards participantsfor sharing what they learn. A piece of
everyone's an-nual bonus is t ied to the number of
contributionsmade to MindShare.
"I'mveryfamiliarwiththery"- ffinoia that some consultants have
croupaboutknowledgemanagement W|-|ffi!Tll[lf*systems-that Lotus
Notes willsteal what's of value in their brains," Pope added.
"Wereally do make it clear that you are more valuable if youcan
teach five other people what you know." ()Mark Leon s a
writer,editor,philosopherand mathe-matician couering cience nd
technology ews.
aa'.EoI@separateromourimplementations."
Allan rankAnswerThink
Aniweiihinklonsultinqroupt : 1fech o ogyE ab edso ut onswvl"w.
nswerthink.com
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