Tapping the Power of e-Mail

Knowing More Than You Know

"Knowledge management" was the buzz five years ago, when many consulting firms, insurance brokerages, advertising agencies, and other service organizations invested in processes and personnel to electronically catalog and store the vast amounts of data that had accumulated via the work done for clients, from client proposals to white papers to the final deliverables.

Virtually every consulting organization has such data repositories in place today. This storehouse of archival information is funneled into new client proposals and strategy work. At KPMG Consulting, for example, the firm discovered that its previous work on behalf of clients represented as much as 65 percent of the knowledge that went into the strategy or implementation work for new clients. Thus, the firm didn't have to reinvent the wheel. "That gave us the ability to pare our fees relative to our client proposals," says Ed Courtney, chief knowledge officer and managing director at KPMG Consulting, Inc., in Radnor, PA.

Smaller consultancies also latched on to knowledge management systems. Zamba Corp., a Campbell, CA–based CRM consultancy and systems integration company whose clients include Hertz Corp., erected a document repository to house its old proposals, pitches to clients, business development and marketing materials, and so forth — "all the data needed by our client pursuit teams to nail an engagement," says Adam Hameed of Zamba. "We can tailor these documents to the specific client's needs in an unbelievably short period of time. It's not uncommon that when a client asks how long will it take us to turn around a proposal, we can honestly say, 'Tomorrow.' That blows them away."

What's new in knowledge management is e-mail. At Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, real-time e-mail string is now stored in the same data repositories as archival white papers and past client proposals.
"E-mail represents the tacit ideas in an organization that walk out the door every night," says Coen. "You would think that knowledge is unavailable, but it isn't. It's actually sitting on these individuals' e-mail servers, in the form of interactions with others in the firm, or with clients, suppliers, and partners. This is dynamic knowledge for business decisions that, heretofore, was lost or unavailable. We decided to capture the strategic value of these interactions so that they would be available to others in the organization or at client firms."
Cap Gemini Ernst & Young liberated its e-mail and instant messaging thread with a tool called MESP, for mail-enabled submission process. The e-mail management software was built by the firm and layered into its knowledge management system. Each e-mail and e-mail thread that a user deems relevant to a particular project, or valuable to the organization as a whole, is taxonimized — that is, words describing the content are attached to the e-mail strings to ensure proper routing to the appropriate repository. "No longer do our 'best practices' walk out the door at night," says Coen.

The challenge for an organization is to mine the gold within the mountain of e-mail and not be overwhelmed by utterances that have only marginal value. That's why selectivity on the part of e-mail senders and appropriate taxonomy by e-mail disseminators is so critical. "Everyone must have the same lexicon and use the same synonyms to describe the intellectual property that resides in the e-mail or e-mail string or instant messaging," says Coen. "You don't want content to be misrepresented."

Virtual Meeting Rooms

KPMG Consulting also installed a knowledge management system in the late '90s, one that it, too, is now upgrading to capture the insight embedded in e-mail. "Our custom-developed database, content management application, and search engine (licensed from software provider Autonomy, Inc.) are the guts of our knowledge management strategy," says Courtney. "But these only addressed static best practices information — the historical record of the research and work we've done. The system did not provide a way to capture the dynamic information presented in e-mail."

The firm hired Intraspect Software, Inc., to bring the knowledge management system to the next level. Intraspect built live collaboration workspaces for KPMG consultants and client teams to work together on projects in real time. E-mail and e-mail strings produced during these interactions are taxonomized and stored in various folders residing on the Web-based workspace. For example, e-mail strings regarding an idea on improving customer service as part of a CRM project for the XYZ Co. would be stored in a "customer service" folder on the XYZ/CRM workspace. "This way, the client and other consulting staff involved in the engagement can peruse the idea in real time and suggest their own thoughts via additional e-mail," says Courtney.
By pursuing this strategy, organizations avoid the difficulty, time, and expense of getting people together for a conference call or flying them all in for a meeting. "Typically, in a traditional consulting engagement, whether in the proposal phase or the actual delivering of the project to the client, we would bring in subject matter experts, sales reps, and a managing director to write the proposal and manage the project," Courtney says. "That's great if everyone is always at your beck and call, which is never the case. Not being able to get the right person to the conference room or on the phone is no way to deliver client solutions. Now we can collaborate in a Web-based workspace in as near to real time as possible, 24-7." During these meetings, consultants can "drag in" to the workspace white papers or other documents for immediate discussion. Other people not specifically involved in the engagement can be invited to the meeting to provide input.    

Meanwhile, the project can be tracked via an electronic calendar that clearly states which consultant is to provide which documents to a particular folder in the workspace by a specific time and date. "There's a lot of interactivity around each stage of the engagement process that occurs in the workspace," Courtney says.
Other pluses include the ability of new employees to quickly get up to speed on a particular consulting strategy engagement or technology implementation, simply by searching the data repositories. And employees leaving the firm don't depart with all that knowledge floating around in their brains or on their file servers.     "Traditionally, when an employee moves on, their e-mail inbox and outbox contain an accumulation of e-mail knowledge that usually is deleted and lost forever," says Robert Schoettle, vice president of marketing at Brisbane, CA–based Intraspect Software, Inc. "That data can now be captured."

The system also notifies project managers or consulting partners whenever a workspace folder is updated with new e-mail, all done behind the scenes via — what else? — e-mail. "Project managers typically are inundated with hundreds of e-mails in a day, all marked 'Urgent'," says Courtney. "Now they receive e-mails that truly are urgent, alerting them to a new idea, a new phase in the project, a problem, and so on." Overall, KPMG Consulting estimates that it's reaping a 30 percent improvement in productivity by employing the collaborative workspace strategy, money Courtney says it can now subtract from the cost of project bids.

Big Brains for Small Firms

These new collaborative e-mail knowledge systems aren't designed exclusively for consulting personnel. Indeed, the idea is to open up the workspace to clients as well. "We store our e-mail in folders that also contain proposal material, important research, and other documentation relevant to that folder, and, depending on the confidentiality of the information within, we make it available to clients," says Keith Nater, director of strategic development at Stellcom, Inc., a San Diego–based consulting and systems integration firm focused on business strategy relative to mobility.

To access data or find subject experts within the firm who may not be involved in that particular client engagement, keywords describing the content transport the user to the appropriate folder. "We did a PowerPoint presentation for Hewlett-Packard several months ago that talked about a specific Blue Tooth technology," says Nater. "In order to find this in the old days, I'd have to remember whose driver it was on. Now I just plug in the keywords, and there it is."

At Zamba Corp., e-mail is the glue holding the company's 300 consultants together. Zamba started life in 1989 as wireless data software company Racotek, which went public in 1996 and then metamorphosed into Zamba, a CRM consultancy, in 1998. During this evolution, the firm grew from about 35 consultants to 300. "Our knowledge back in the hunter-gatherer days was very tribal — given our scale," Hameed says. "Everything was in people's heads and hard drives, so if you wanted anything, you simply had to know whom to call for answers."

That worked fine with 35 people, but when the tribe blossomed to 200 employees in six offices around the country, things started to strain. "At first, we had some people build these ad hoc databases that were pretty good band-aid solutions, but unless you knew what was on a particular database, you were looking for a needle in a haystack," Hameed says.

The databases also did not capture Zamba's e-mail traffic. "We're heavily e-mail–centric here," Hameed explains. "E-mail is our knowledge transfer conduit, yet it is not the most efficient thing in the world. Who has time to synch up to dozens of e-mails 24 hours a day?" He notes that when developing a client proposal, he'd typically send out e-mails asking who in the firm had done that type of implementation before. "Four days later, the responses would come in," he says. "By then, someone else had the engagement."
Fortunately, Zamba's new CEO, Doug Holden, had worked with Intraspect at KPMG Consulting, where he was a practice director. "Doug brought with him this centralized approach to managing e-mail and other knowledge," Hameed says. "No one has to look far now to find whatever they need, from an expert on a particular implementation to a specific white paper or e-mail thread."
Zamba uses a collaborative, Web-based application from Intraspect that lets its consultants exchange documents through the firm's Web site — which captures and routes critical information — and not its proprietary network. Employees can search a database of e-mail messages, memoranda, old pitches to clients, white papers, instant messaging sessions — any knowledge deemed crucial. "It used to be that 90 percent of the documentation in a project was in Word and PowerPoint," says Hameed. "Now, the project-relevant material is in e-mail threads."

Other firms besides Intraspect specialize in collaborative e-mail management systems. Microsoft's eRoom application has within it a shared folder feature that can incorporate e-mail threads, as does Lotus Notes' QuickPlace application. But Gartner's Hayward, who has studied the on-the-shelf systems, says that the difference is that Intraspect's system "assumes that e-mail is the primary environment for sharing knowledge."
So what's the next big thing beyond e-mail in the field of knowledge management? Basically, more refinement in existing systems. For example, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, which also stores e-mail threads in its knowledge management system, is paring the organization's data down to its most essential elements. "We're in the process of replacing our intranet with an enterprise portal that will permit our consultants to select only that information deemed critical to a particular project," says Melissa Marroso, PwC Americas leader for knowledge management.

"The portal will take knowledge management to the next level, pushing critical information to consultants, as opposed to them pulling it out of the system." The "push" part comes from some 200 PwC knowledge managers armed with new technology which is at this point proprietary.
Cap Gemini Ernst & Young has a somewhat similar project in mind. "We're working on a way for e-mail to be automatically codified and taxonomized as it is being sent and received, with very little, if any, human input," says Coen. "Technology will give us the ability to determine the content of e-mail and its relevance to a project. Then, it's just a simple matter to direct that e-mail to the appropriate repository."
Adds Coen: "Once we get there, and we will soon, it will be the single greatest opportunity for an organization to leverage its intellectual capital."