ISM ASSIGNMENT

Katzenbach Partners
DATE OF SUBMISSION- 08.11.2012

SUBMITTED BY:SECTION-C, GROUP 13: Abhijit Das- 2012PGP005 Ashwin Vijayan- 2012PGP073 Kumar Abhishek- 2012PGP178 Payal Anand- 2012FPM10 Rajat- 2012PGP292 Sumit Bapuji Gedam- 2012PGP382 Vikash Kumar- 2012PGP438

1) What technologies did Katzenbach Partners use for its Knowledge Management? Why did Katzenbach Partners select those technologies? In 2003 Katzenbach Partners released the HUB, an internally developed intranet that served as a hub for information about staffing, finances, projects and trainings. The HUB enabled the firm to scale its management practices and was continually updated to reflect the evolving needs of the firm and chances in technology. Later the firm began development of HUB+ in Nov,2006 with a team led by Mary Ferguson. Katzenbach used HUB initially and HUB+ afterwards because of the following reasons: a. It was an intranet technology which allowed sharing of knowledge and restriction access with permissions only. b. It was developed by the firm itself because application available in the market did not suit firm requirements. c. It was updatable to suit the needs and demands of firm according to the needs of the firm and advancements in technology. d. It enabled the users to tag the documents as they seem appropriate which later on helped in the classification of the documents. 2) Why did Canner feel that the system developed at Katzenbach Partners is distinctly different from commercially available systems? Flexibility: It allowed firm members to keep their own approach to knowledge management. It incorporated formal and informal methods of classifying documents. Informal Classification: The users can classify documents and tag them as per their requirements for easy accessibility. Openness: The tags were made public so that the documents are shared throughout the organization with few restrictions based on sensitivity. The system generated search results were better aligned with the keywords. Integration: Use of synonym rings to guess appropriate categories. Better analytics: The best document would rise to the top because of their popularity.

 Rule agnostics: There were very few rules and thus more convenient to use. Better UI: Helpful recommendation and tag clouds appearing in the user screen. Personal repository: A space for each user to put items of personal interest and hyperlinks.

3) Discuss the spiral of knowledge (the 4 types of knowledge creation or acquisition) in the context of Katzenbach Partners. Tacit to tacit: (Socialization) Sharing of tacit knowledge took place by direct contact of the firm members. Such socialization was enhanced by creating a set of champion roles around intellectual capital areas. Tacit to explicit: (Articulation) The articulation of the tacit knowledge the acquired occurred when members documented their work into final reports. Explicit to explicit: (Combination) The knowledge database Hub was used to share this explicit knowledge with all employees and led to creation of more explicit knowledge in the process. Explicit to tacit: (Internalization) Thus the retained explicit knowledge in the system for the base for tacit knowledge of the individuals and the spiral of knowledge continued. By these patterns the knowledge of the company was retained and enhanced. It all led to the development of tacit knowledge of the employees which in turn developed the explicit knowledge of the organization.