Best of your knowledge

Our clients employ us for it, our peers demand it of us, the owners of our companies take it for granted and our staff have it. In essence it is they core of a consultancy: knowledge.

Yet gathering and exploiting the specialist knowledge that is held by a practice can be a daunting task, unless, that is, you have the right systems and, importantly, attitudes in place.

If a high proportion of your firm's activities are repetitive, and you regularly reuse the same information, carefully recording and storing it to make it easy to retrieve will be crucial.

For those businesses required to provide constantly inventive and unique solutions, IT will be less handy for storing expert data; more so for communicating with clients. But most organisations will want to have the right systems in place to facilitate both.

Obviously, some of the specialist experience an employee gains over the years cannot be easily recorded. Techniques an experienced engineer uses to provide a quick insight into complex problems cannot be logged and preserved. The upkeep of databases also tends to fall by the wayside when more important project deadlines continually loom.

However, a good system that requires employees to contribute to, and regularly update, knowledge databases is vital; otherwise you run the risk that when staff leave the company, useful resources are lost with them.

The competitive environment of an engineering consultancy won't necessarily encourage this kind of collaboration. Often engineers fear that if they don't keep what they learn to themselves, they will be less indispensable to the company and could risk losing their job. Sometimes the problem is that experts who spend time and effort to continually develop their experience, resent sharing it with those less committed.

This simply means there is a crucial role for management to play in ensuring knowledge is stored as necessary. This must happen both by investing time and finance to set up the appropriate technology and techniques, and by providing access to experts within the firm or externally. A work culture needs to be created where employees are encouraged to seek, and share, knowledge.

These days, the internet increasingly plays a role in providing staff with expert information. As useful as the internet is for this, care must be taken to use the information in the context in which it is supplied, and to verify that the information is current and accurate. Credible sources of information only must be used - well-known manufacturers or installers, or trade bodies such as CIBSE and IEE.

The online access of publications and web casts are also useful tools for staying abreast of changes in the industry.

Online discussion forums enable peer-to-peer communication, but again the information gained needs to be verified before being used. If it is supplied by established organisations - BSIRA, BRE, BCO, BSI, ERA, the Barbour Index, the Copper Development Association and The Carbon Trust etc - you can usually rely on it!

But although investing in IT systems for knowledge management will be high on the agenda for any competitive company, it is important to remember that this is no substitute for practical experience. Nor for a healthy work environment in which staff feel comfortable sharing the specialist knowledge they have gained with one another.

It may require a change of thinking in some engineering companies that are not used to operating in this way. But effective managers can make this happen - especially if they follow a structured implementation plan. And in order to stay competitive in the long term, such a plan will be essential.

Brian Goldstein is a senior associate at Jaros Baum & Bolles