Knowledge Management at Ernst & Young ppt
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Ernst & Young (E&Y) is one of the largest professional services firms in the world with over 152,000 employees across 100+ countries. Since 1994, E&Y has made pioneering efforts in knowledge management and organizational learning (KM/OL) and has received over a dozen awards for its leadership in this area. E&Y takes a centralized approach to KM, with its Center for Business Knowledge (CBK) responsible for knowledge strategy, infrastructure, and research services. The firm's intranet, called Knowledge Web, provides access to over 1 million documents and knowledge repositories across the firm. E&Y has also focused on building a knowledge sharing culture through extensive training programs, internal marketing, and reward mechanisms
Knowledge Management at Ernst & Young ppt
- 2. Ernst & Young (“E&Y”) is one of the world’s largest integrated professional service firms and an acknowledged global leader in knowledge management. The firm has over 152,000 employees in over 100 countries, practicing in four service lines: audit and business advisory, tax and law, consulting, and corporate finance. Since its pioneering knowledge management and organizational learning (“KM/OL”) efforts began in 1994, the firm has since received at least a dozen awards for its KM/OL leadership. 12 February 2014
- 3. These include being named in the Top five world’s Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE Award) recognition two years running. The firm’s employees share a 650-person centrally managed Knowledge Organization (the “CBK—Center for Business Knowledge”), and have universal access to its knowledge-powered Intranet (the “Knowledge Web”). The firm is selling its consulting practice to Cap Gemini, but Cap Gemini has insisted on having ongoing access to the CBK and the Knowledge Web as part of the deal. 12 February 2014
- 4. E&Y’s Knowledge Framework Strategy Infrastructure Content Services Relationships Processes People & Organization 12 February 2014
- 5. ASSESSING NEED PLANNING & STRATEGY IMPLEMENTATION REINFORCEMENT EVALUATION 12 February 2014
- 6. Accordingly, E&Y established a Global Knowledge Steering Group (“GKSG”) consisting of the newly-appointed Chief Knowledge Officers of its US, Canadian, and UK firms. In addition, the GKSG included the global Vice Chair who is responsible for infrastructure, reporting directly to the global management committee. It had just drafted a business strategy called Future State, whose four major focuses (development of a sales culture, practice globalization, becoming an Employer of Choice, and accelerating speed-to-market), dovetailed precisely with the potential offerings of KM/OL. 12 February 2014
- 7. The four drivers of the need for world-class KM/OL at E&Y were (and still are): Growth: E&Y needed to accelerate the development of new products and services especially in the e-commerce area, to replace “commodity” services and increase organizational growth. Cost and Speed to Market: Both in pursuit of new assignments and in work delivery, E&Y needed to reduce cost-of-sales and reduce time to prepare deliverables. Customer Satisfaction: E&Y needed to increase its depth of knowledge about clients and their industries and about its own global competencies and best practices to enhance customer satisfaction and increase “share of client”. 12 February 2014
- 8. Learning Curve: Due to the traditional high turnover in its profession, E&Y needed to offer its people access to learning materials and knowledge that would make them quickly proficient and productive in new practice areas. 12 February 2014
- 9. E&Y’s knowledge program assessment has focused, since day one, on five types of success measures: Accessibility of the firm’s people to KM/OL resources and staff (this measure category was later dropped when penetration reached 100%). Rate of contribution of knowledge to the firm’s repositories. Rate of re-use of knowledge from the firm’s repositories. User-surveyed quality of knowledge in the firm’s repositories and of deliverables of CBK staff. Recognition of E&Y’s KM/OL leadership by three groups: outside awards, E&Y’s own people (unsolicited kudos), and university recruiters (becoming an “Employer of Choice”). 12 February 2014
- 10. Building on a set of mutually agreed fundamental KM/OL principles, the GKSG developed a 5-step process to implement KM/OL 1. Strategy: Development of a KM/OL strategy, future state vision, value propositions, and design principles (managed by the GKSG itself). 2. Architecture: Design and development of the knowledge architecture, access tools and content, both internal-source and external-source (managed by the CBK Architecture and Extranet groups). 3. Infrastructure: Design and development of the seven distinct) roles, knowledge network mechanisms and HR to support KM/OL (managed by the CBK Knowledge Services and Knowledge Networks groups). 4. Culture 5. Innovation: 12 February 2014
- 11. E&Y selected a combination of a Lotus Notes and Web technology platform, for pragmatic reasons. Practitioners spend an average of 4 days out of 5 at client sites, where they were often disconnected from the Web. The practitioners needed Notes’ ability to automatically replicate changes to major repositories to users’ hard drives when users were connected to the firm network, so that these repositories would be available when they weren’t. Notes was also a simple platform for adding, deleting, and maintaining content, requiring no programming or Web skills. 12 February 2014
- 12. The firm also decided upon a small, standard set of repository formats, or “container types.” These ranged from: Simple Small Document Libraries and Engagement Team Databases, used by teams in a small community of practice or work assignment respectively. More sophisticated Large Document Repositories, with a comprehensive indexing taxonomy for finding relevant documents among tens of thousands of unfiltered “knowledge objects,” PowerPacks, the highly filtered, tightly organized “best-of-the best” repositories on specific, professional, subject-matter areas. The architecture group designed these standard container types by selecting best practices from existing consulting services databases. They then generalized them into reusable templates. 12 February 2014
- 13. Network Communications, made up of industry news and events details Sales and Marketing Material, comprising brochures, presentations, proposals, credentials, client and competitor information. Service Delivery, made up of exemplary client deliverables, tools and methodologies, internal best practices and war stories. Process Models, Benchmarks and Leading Practices— such as external practices, processes and performance measures. Regulations and Technical Standards, which are industry specific regulations and standards. E&Y Articles, Publications & Research, such as published articles, speeches, white papers, and position statements. Learning Resources, which are training materials and external reference material. 12 February 2014
- 14. E&Y has put in place a central service responsible for internal knowledge management, the Center for Business Knowledge (CBK). The center is in charge of: Strategic analysis at both industry and company level. The knowledge infrastructure. This involves designing tools, processes, and principles for knowledge sharing throughout the organization. Specialist research services, offered to the rest of the firm on a cost recovery basis. These services are delivered through a business research team and a strategy analysis team. These teams carry out in-depth, focused analysis on demand. 12 February 2014
- 15. The firm’s approach to KM is, therefore, fairly centralized. E&Y thinks the centralized approach is necessary to ensure adequate coordination of the knowledge efforts of the firm, develop and apply common standards, and ensure best practice. A key feature of KM at E&Y is the building of knowledge networks across the firm. Knowledge networks are virtual groups of people who participate in a particular industry, process, or discipline. 12 February 2014
- 16. The main “home” for knowledge at E&Y is called Knowledge Web (KWeb). The KWeb is essentially a gateway to: In excess of 1,000,000 documents—a number which is growing on a daily basis. 5,000 internal “Lotus Notes Databases”, of which 8% to 10% are full knowledge bases (the others being workflow or administration databases). External content, such as Reuters Business Briefing, Gartner Group research, Forrester, OneSource, and other company financial databases, etc. 12 February 2014
- 17. Architecture Implementation As Web and connectivity technologies have improved, the firm has “Dominoized” most of its Notes-based architecture. It has developed a succession of increasingly powerful Web-based navigation tools: Knowledge Catalogue : a simple “table of contents” searchable directory of the firm’s 1000+ knowledge repositories. Knowledge Search Engine : a complete key-word index of over 1 million knowledge objects, with relevancy ranking and an ability to display retrieved objects in both native (e.g. Notes, Word or PowerPoint) and Web format. 12 February 2014
- 18. Service Delivery Tools : self-documenting software applications that take practitioners step-by-step through a professional sale, service delivery, or practice management process, and automatically extract the knowledge from the “KnowledgeWeb” that is relevant to each process step. Personal Home Page : a completely configurable personal Intranet Home Page that links to all of the profiled news, repositories, communities of interest, service delivery tools, schedules and work-lists. Community HomeSpaces : navigators that give members of a Community of Interest dynamic access to all of the knowledge, and only the knowledge, about the community’s subject matter. 12 February 2014
- 19. People and Culture: E&Y’s Knowledge Culture initiatives encompass training, internal marketing, communication, measurement, and reward mechanisms. These are all designed to reinforce the importance of making knowledge sharing an integral part of what everyone in the firm does. Ultimately, the goal is to embed “knowledge behaviors” into all core business processes so that knowledge sharing simply becomes, as one practitioner recently put it, “the way we do things around here.” The CBK provided curricula, internal marketing material and “train the trainer” sessions to these departments. The customization was left to localized needs. E&Y’s KM/OL training focuses on three things: awareness of KM/OL resources, how to use repositories and access tools, and effective knowledge network training. 12 February 2014
- 20. Training for the knowledge professionals (CBK staff plus practitioners with specific KM/OL roles described earlier) is separate from training for end users. Knowledge training is currently integrated into all service line PD programs. Three training tools and techniques are used: An entry-level curriculum to bring new hires up to speed; The Global Deployment Hub to house KM/OL training materials and DTL modules. Business Unit training liaisons which are people from the CBK who train-the-trainers and help business units embed KM/OL modules into their training curricula. Through these three training methods, over 80,000 E&Y employees have been trained since 1996, one business unit at a time. Each training started with a pilot group in each country and each service line to adapt the training to local and specialty needs. The critical aspects of the implementation program have all been Knowledge Culture change aspects: communication, training, internal marketing, measurement & reward, and achieving external recognition for KM/OL achievements. It is a never-ending challenge. 12 February 2014
- 21. E&Y continues to offer “lunch & learn” training in new KM/OL products. E&Y offers an automated “assisted navigation” feature in its access toolkit that helps users find what they need online by asking and answering simple English-language questions. The goals now are to simplify tools and processes to make the use of KM/OL easier, reduce training needs, and handle information overload. 12 February 2014
- 22. E&Y’s KM/OL strategy has benefited the firm in six ways. Its Return on Investment (“ROI”) in technology is much higher the proportion of practitioners using their laptops for more than just e-mail has risen from under half to over 90 percent since 1996. New staff has become knowledgeable and hence productive in the field much faster. Many deliverables are built on templates or on deliverables from previous assignments, rather than built from scratch. As testimonials and customer data indicates, E&Y clients, its people, and outside evaluators all see E&Y as a global leader in KM/OL. 12 February 2014
- 23. Its clients see E&Y as more knowledgeable about their business, and therefore view it as a more rounded service provider. Potential new recruits now perceive E&Y as an excellent learning environment to work in and hence E& Y is an Employer of Choice. 12 February 2014
- 24. The four types of measures described in Phase One remain the firm’s key evaluation criteria: Rate of contribution of knowledge to the firm’s repositories (number of new knowledge objects added). Rate of re-use of knowledge from the firm’s repositories (number of user sessions per day). User-surveyed quality of knowledge in the firm’s repositories, and of deliverables of CBK staff (users rate completeness, accuracy, subjective value and timeliness on a 10point scale). Recognition of E&Y’s KM/OL leadership by three groups: outside awards, E&Y’s own people (unsolicited kudos), and university recruiters (becoming an Employer of Choice). 12 February 2014
- 25. E&Y faces two main challenges in sustaining its “Knowledge Advantage” The next KM/OL frontier after Knowledge Sharing is Knowledge Collaboration the leveraging of knowledge in a collaborative environment, rather than just person-to-person knowledge transfer Work assignments (even those meted out by work teams) are to individuals. This raises the KM/OL ante from knowledge sharing to knowledge- collaboration. It will require a quantum increase in effort, cultural change, improvement in supporting technologies, and KM/OL thought leadership. While E&Y is working with several leading-edge organizations to grapple with this issue, the challenge is daunting. 12 February 2014
- 26. Delivering Value Delivering value is a key objective of the knowledge management effort at E&Y. Financially, partners need to be convinced that resources (people, time, money, purchase of external content) need to be committed to the KM efforts. 12 February 2014
- 27. In the first stages of implementation, for instance, the roll-out of the full text search engine was put on hold for a while. This was partly due to budgetary constraints, essentially brought about by the need for benefits to be demonstrated before further funds were committed. Demonstrating value is also seen as an important building stone of the knowledge sharing culture. Being involved in the knowledge process takes time and effort at all levels, and this has to be justified, and justifiable. The firm and, therefore, the business units need to keep funding the effort, and individuals need to share and use knowledge. It is an onerous process at all levels. 12 February 2014
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- 31. THANK YOU! 12 February 2014