34.4 Sharing knowledge with clients

Sharing knowledge with clients4 is increasingly regarded as one of the main purposes of consulting and other professional services (see Chapters 1 and 3). However, declaring that knowledge-sharing with clients is the firm’s policy is not enough for practical purposes. Knowledge-sharing is not automatic and can be hampered by inappropriate attitudes and work methods. Consultants working on client assignments will need their firms’ guidance and technical support on questions such as:

●whether they are free to choose what knowledge to share during assignments;

●what knowledge is to be treated as the firm’s trade secret (see Appendix 5) or as confidential and is thus not to be shared with anyone without the prior approval of the consulting firm’s management;

●who in the firm will answer questions on knowledge transfer and sharing, and provide guidance;

●what knowledge-sharing will be regarded as an integral part of an assignment workplan and contract;

●how much time consultants should allocate to knowledge-sharing and what methods they should use;

●how to handle intellectual property issues when transferring knowledge to clients or creating new knowledge jointly with clients (Appendix 5).

Knowledge-sharing must not be hampered by bureacratic procedures, and experienced consultants will usually be able to decide how to proceed when working with particular clients. However, knowledge-sharing is an attitude and a skill, and some consultants – especially in small or medium-sized firms – may need encouragement and guidance to be more effective at it (box 34.1).

Furthermore, many consulting companies have started to disseminate and share knowledge with their whole clientele or with the general business public. This is sometimes done in traditional ways, through papers, articles, books, conferences, newsletters and similar. Some companies, however, offer access to certain parts of their knowledge base, either via the Internet or through specially designed extranets. A well-designed knowledge base and an authorization model are fundamental to this business model. “Pay per view” priced content is already used as an additional way to exploit internal knowledge externally. In addition to allowing knowledge to be shared, these approaches arouse interest in the firm and demonstrate the firm’s continued support to existing clients.

All these initiatives have their costs and need to be monitored and coordinated. Quality and respect for users are critical. Some consultants have posted trivial,