The work-knowledge cohesion: Integrating knowledge management with deliverable work for knowledge-intensive services

Knowledge-intensive services are prevalent in B2B environment involving complex problems and custom solutions. As such services consume and generate a large amount of information, knowledge-sharing mechanisms are required to capture, transfer and reuse information across projects. So far, with the advent of the internet, the business community has mainly focused on web-based technologies for knowledge sharing. The most common approach is a web portal through which a practitioner can access the organization's collection of intellectual capital. This approach, however, has notable drawbacks. In particular, they often fail to stimulate active user participation, in terms of both contributing to and using the knowledge base. The problem, as we see it, is largely caused by the separation between the environment of a client engagement and that of knowledge management. In this paper, we propose a knowledge management system that is integrated into the process of delivering a client engagement. The integration is realized at two levels: at the content level, the knowledge is organized by a framework that is central to the client engagement at hand; at the tool level, the knowledge management system is embedded in the software for developing work products for a client engagement The advantages of the proposed integration over existing tools are discussed.