Accenture Knowledge Management Knowledge Management

Accenture Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management at Accenture

To the extent that Accenture excels at knowledge management is the extent to which it this globally-based consultancy can attain its long-term revenue and profit objectives. Critical to Accenture's day-to-day fulfillment of clients' projects is the need for managing knowledge as a strategic asset (Paik, Choi, 2005), creating taxonomies that are process-based rather than reflecting the tight, often insular silos that typically the Accenture culture during the time period of the case study (Terjessen, 2003). Accenture has many impediments to being able to use knowledge management as a competitive asset, with the most significant being a lack of shared ownership of the data within the organization and a resulting proliferation of portals, some more fully populated with data and search functionality than others, yet all lacking cross-department and cross-division integration (Meister, 2005). During the time period of interest Accenture is comprised of a Communications and High Tech Division, Financial Services, Government, Products and Resources Division. Each of these divisions has perpetuated sporadic and often incomplete processes for transforming their knowledge into a shared corporate asset. Given how balkanized this has made Accenture, with each separate portal created for a specific purpose, project or process, resistance to change becomes more significant (Benbya, Passiante, Belbaly, 2004). The many challenges for Accenture emanate from how the company has structured its organization to foster and nurture individual performance for clients yet desperately needs knowledge collaboration and knowledge management at the division, intra-divisional and corporate levels. The intent of this analysis is to present an organizational audit for Accenture, evaluating key management practices first, then identify and evaluate the key issues and challenges the company faced as it attempted to create an enterprise-wide knowledge management strategy. The paper concludes with a strategic management plan for Accenture to overcome the many challenges they face in unifying the exceptionally high level and quality of knowledge the company's talented employees generate daily.

Assessing Accenture Using an Organizational Audit

The development of organizational knowledge is an accumulative process that is heavily dependent on the culture of an organization, the clarity of its processes, systems and role integration to support strategic plans and objectives (Khalifa, Yu, Shen, 2008). For Accenture, their core business value proposition relies heavily on the ability to quickly transform knowledge into a deliverable to a client, from the simplest project or plan to the most complex programming projects. The timeframes within Accenture, as has been stated often in the case (Terjessen, 2003) are often highly compressed and bordering unrealistic given the depth and magnitude of projects taken on. In the highly time-constrained aspects of Accenture's business model that seeks to quickly and thoroughly resolve complex, very difficult challenges of their clients, having an enterprise-wise knowledge management strategy is crucial. For Accenture, speed and completeness of response to clients is directly proportional to their ability to transform knowledge from a tactical asset to a strategic one.

The ability of any organization, including Accenture, to transform its culture to support the creation of knowledge as the competitive differentiator vs. competing on pricing for goods and services often attains higher profitability in the long-term (Song, 2008). This dynamic is due to knowledge becoming the competitive advantage in terms of the R&D, product development in manufacturing-centric industries, and for knowledge-intensive ones, the ability to deliver exceptional insight, valuable knowledge that can quickly transform their clients' businesses (Ngai, Jin, Liang, 2008). Accenture is also called upon to be process-centric in their prescriptive guidance to service companies and manufacturers alike. In serving this latter group of clients, Accenture's gaps and lapses in knowledge management are particularly acute in the lack of process knowledge orientation and process management expertise as it relates to manufacturing clients' strategic planning needs. The extent of differentiation between serviced-based fulfillment and services processes relative to manufacturing-based fulfillment and services requires exceptional knowledge management skills to navigate (Paiva, Roth, Fensterseifer, 2008). In other words, the siloing of knowledge by division, department or even work team over time robs Accenture from the ability to quickly fulfill the expectations of their clients. As Accenture serves clients across manufacturing and services sectors, an audit of their approach to knowledge management and lack of cross-divisional collaboration degenerates their ability to be as effective as they can be in the service of clients. Lack of a consistent knowledge management within any organization potentially impacts their credibility and inhibits their ability to become trusted advisors to their clients over the long-term (Buchen, 35 -- 37). Accenture's efficiency then is not at stake; their reputation and ability to continually get new business is however. Accenture can also become more of a catalyst for significant market growth and be a source of innovation in the industries that are by nature knowledge-intensive by concentrating on their own knowledge management strategies as well. Accenture has the potential to become a significant force in industries they serve that rely on knowledge management as a core part of their businesses as well. Research shown on the effects of collaboration in knowledge-intensive industries can make the difference between their growth in aggregate or not (Bjornson, Dingsoyr, 2008), (Liu, Liu, 2008). Knowledge is the catalyst by which organizations learn over time how to increase their performance and attain higher levels of efficiency, leading to greater profitability. The correlation of an organizations' culture to create and nurture knowledge, transforming it into Intellectual Capital (IC) that is defensible as a competitive advantage, is a crucial factor in the long-term viability of any organizations' financial health (Moustaghfir, 2008). For Accenture, not only their credibility, but also their long-term financial growth is going to be dictated to how they attack the massive inconsistencies in how knowledge is categorized, stored and accessed on client-based engagements. Intellectual Capital is defined as knowledge an organization creates based on its unique competitive strengths. In addition, organizations that are adept at transforming their knowledge into Intellectual Capital also have defined processes for ensuring that knowledge is retained from one generation of workers to the next (Blankenship, Brueck, 2008). For Accenture, the ability to transform knowledge into Intellectual Capital, they also begin to experience a network effect (Themistocleous, Mantzana, Morabito, 2009) where knowledge acts as the catalyst for the creation of entirely different, and much more streamlined processes that align to strategic objectives of the organization (Wagner, 2002).

How Knowledge Acquires Value in Organizations

Arguably the economic growth of Accenture is more related to their ability to quickly and correctly interpret, analyze, and respond to internal and external events than on any other aspect of their business model. More broadly, any given organizations' ability to create taxonomies that are structured enough to provide guidance yet flexible enough to allow for role-based queries have consistently shown the ability to consistently deliver more differentiated and higher-quality products (Benbya, Passiante, Belbaly, 2004). In auditing the processes that Accenture relied on for knowledge management during this case study it is also clear that role-based queries had yet to be integrated into their workflows; portals were purely personal productivity tools in the majority of instances. Secondarily, the ontologies that Accenture needs to define interrelationships in data have become increasingly pervasive in the consulting and advisory services business models globally (Boh, 2008). Yet Accenture lacks ontological organization of their data and no apparent Enterprise Content Management (ECM) framework upon which to build from. As a result, Accenture is at a significant competitive disadvantage. While the company may perceive that time invested by its associates is the greatest competitive advantage, in fact it is the ability to define role-based and process-based workflows to the existing knowledgebase that is inaccessible and not usable enough to be of value to many Accenture employees.

The ECM framework that Accenture adopted initially was called the KX Global Roadmap, an ambitious, company-wide program for migrating off of Lotus Notes and onto a single, integrated network. The strategic value of the KX Global Roadmap was to provide for a transition from separate, often fragmented global communications to a single, unified organizational memory. The intent of this transition was to also transform Accenture from being a reactive organization to being one more focused on learning (Themistocleous, Mantzana, Morabito, 2009). In conjunction with a significant cultural shift, the intent was to create an organization that could produce knowledge as a key asset in and of itself; in other words the strategic plan was for Accenture to eventually become a "learning organization" as a result of the development of the KX Global Roadmap.

From the audit completed of their existing knowledge management practices however, it is clear that taxonomies shared across divisions are rarely found; in fact taxonomies are more often created between associates who must rely on each other to share data. Conversely, Accenture's future growth is specifically tied to their ability to create an ECM framework that can also change the culture at the same time. Previous frameworks which have succeeded begin first with the development of an enterprise-wide data warehouse that is created through the use of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) adapters and connectors to ensure real-time accessibility and availability of knowledge throughout the system (Themistocleous, Mantzana, Morabito, 2009). In addition to the integration of the many disparate, often previously isolated systems, companies who rely on knowledge management as critical to their core business model also create a specific layer dedicated to just analytics (Dolezalek, 2003). These frameworks increasingly rely on data mining and search algorithms that can traverse databases and systems from a wide variety of Accenture practice and development teams, even those that are legacy-based and internally developed.

Yet another aspect of the KX Global Roadmap is the requirement of concentrating on how to compensate for the wide variation in structured relative to unstructured data throughout the organization as well. The case study only partially mentions this, yet it is a very critical concern given how much Accenture clients are relying on this firm to interpret and make the most of all forms of content, from the highly structured data that is generated from IT systems to unstructured data gained from Web 2.0 (Bernoff, Li, 2008) applications and technologies. Clearly in the case study (Terjessen, 2003) there is little thought into how, once the Lotus Notes transition is achieved, that the company will manage both unstructured and structured data. This is a strategic oversight the company must address going forward. The best practices of transforming both unstructured and structured content into linguistic models that can further strengthen Accenture's thought leadership and unique differentiation is called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) (Wei, Yang, Lin, 2008). Google uses LSI extensively in their PageRank algorithm, and it is increasingly being proven as a technology for interpreting the massive amounts of unstructured content organizations need to interpret and act on to further strengthen their knowledge management initiatives (Wei, Yang, Lin, 2008). LSI techniques for categorizing data and making it into a strategic asset is critical for an ECM framework to be exceptionally valuable, and this especially holds true for KX Global Rollout (Wei, Yang, Lin, 2008). Figure 1, Deloitte Knowledge Management Timeline, provides a comparison of each phase of their journey to knowledge management being strategic vs. isolated and often disconnected as a resource. The transition from Lotus Notes to the KX Global Rollout did not follow the traditional progression of senior management dictating the need for this; rather, it was the realization that for each member of a development team to excel in their jobs, an urgent redirection of strategy was critical (Terjessen, 2003).

Figure 1: Deloitte Knowledge Management Timeline

In auditing the knowledge management processes within Deloitte, it was obvious that the extensive amount of insights, expertise and intellect that the company had acquired from serving customers was not being applied to the firm's own challenges. A case of cobbler's children so to speak, Deloitte had failed to turn one of its most potentially lethal competitive weapons, its own accumulated knowledge, into a strong service differentiator over the long-term. In their competitors including McKinsey & Company (Nemati, 2002) the strategic planning processes center on the continual improvement of knowledge management and decision support, as the continual improvement of internal processes is critical for McKinsey to stay competitive. The ancillary strategic goals of ensuring a continually higher level of customer service and support, the continual improvement of sales and marketing, and the support of new research and new services development processes all are critical strategic priorities for McKinsey & Company, Accenture and the many other advisory firms in this industry. Paradoxically however these advisory firms and consultancies vary significantly in terms of their ability to transform knowledge into a lasting competitive asset they can use to retain and grow their client bases.

In conclusion, after

Key management practices that have been included in this audit of Accenture begin with an analysis of how balkanized the knowledge management processes are, including a sure symptom of this occurring within any organizational culture, the proliferation of portals across divisions and even within departments (Neumann, O'Murchu, Breslin, Decker, et al. 2005). As the article specifically shows through a series of vignettes and short scenarios, in the absence of a synchronized content management and knowledge management strategy, associates are left to forage and seek out information through their informal contacts.(Terjessen, 2003). While downplayed in the case, this can often lead to information and knowledge hoarding in the most lucrative practice areas while also leading to knowledge scarcity in those areas were associates feel they must protect the information they have to protect their jobs. In essence without a strong ECM framework that was originally defined as the KX strategy, inadequate manual processes, often highly time-consuming and reliant more on informal networks than process enablement strategically, significantly slow down the performance of any organization. The ensuing resistance to change specifically in the area of information and data sharing can be crippling to any enterprise IT strategy, which has often been the case in Enterprise Resourcing Planning (ERP) systems for example (Newell, Huang, Tansley, 2006). Second, each of the divisions with Accenture had their own taxonomies, ontologies and specific indexes defined for traversing the knowledge they tended to protect in their networks. Third, each division had gone as far as to also create their own knowledge management applications and escalation procedures for getting and giving assistance within their own teams. The audit shows the dangers that can happen with a firm becomes too myopic with regard to their knowledge management strategies. Compounding all these factors are the point that resistance to change had never been higher as many associates equated their value to Accenture by the amount of information they controlled within their own departments and divisions.

Key Issues and Challenges Accenture Faced

Most significant is the resistance to change that Accenture will have to deal with as it attempts to get the dozens of applications throughout individual work teams consolidated for use across the entire organization. Resistance to change will be extremely difficult to contend with over the entire duration of this project. The success or failure of the KX Global Rollout will be in proportion to how effective the project leaders are in infusing a high sense of ownership in each of those Accenture teams most impacted by the corporate-wide knowledge management project. This issue of change management had to be dealt with head-on and daily in order for the KX Global Rollout to succeed.

Additional challenges are in the areas of application development, design, navigation and integration of existing applications into the KX Global platform, logistics and an introduction to the use of corporate-wide processes over merely relying on information networks for fulfilling information and knowledge requests. Despite the fact that Deloitte did have databases, the lack of integration across them hindered the ability of associates to better collaborate with each other and with clients to get them to their goals (Themistocleous, Mantzana, Morabito, 2009).

The application development phase of the KX Global Rollout was a major challenge for Accenture as well. Aside from the "not invented here" attitude that many had for the development being done offshore in India for the KX Global Portal, ironically many of the system analysts given responsibility for working with the Indian development teams realized their skill sets surpassed that of the developers. There was also the lack of accountability for missed deadlines and a cultural disconnect between the Accenture teams supporting offshore development with domain expertise about the company and its processes. In the Accenture culture, deadlines and schedules were sacrosanct yet in the Indian offshore developer, they were often missed. This caused significant friction between the two groups. Second, the design and navigation of the KX Global Knowledge system had to take into account over thirty different applications, all created by separate groups throughout Accenture. This led to the development teams having to create entirely new approaches to integrating systems together. This also forced the need fro specific ontological relationships between databases that had never been integrated together before, in addition to the development of entirely new taxonomies that could align successfully with the specific strategic directions of Accenture. In effect this change to design of the KX Global knowledge system began to illustrate how the company had to change their fundamental approach to knowledge management so it became more strategic, less tactical, more enterprise-wide, less siloed.