KM Strategic Focus: codification or personalization?CodificationWeightBusiness Strategy QuestionWeightPersonalizationProviding high-quality, reliable, fast and cost ef-fective services.What type of business do you think your company is in? Providing creative, rig-orous, and highly cus-tomized services and products.You reuse por-tions of old doc-uments to cre-ate new ones. You use existingproducts to cre-ate new ones. You know that every time you have to deliver something new to a customer, you need not begin from scratch.How much old material such as past project data, existing documents and archived projects do you reuse as a part of new projects?Every problem has a high chance of being a “one off” and unique problem. Although cu-mulative learning is in-volved, highly creative solutions are often called for. Price-based competitionWhat is the costing model used for your company’s products and services? Expertise-based pric-ing; high prices are not detrimental to your business; price-based competition barely (if atall) exists. Very low profit margins; overall revenues need to be maximizedWhat are your firm’s typical profit margins? Very high profit mar-gins.2to increase net profits.Your industry’s?IT is a primary enabler; the ob-jective is to con-nect people dis-tributed across the enterprise with codified knowledge (such as re-ports, documen-tation, code, etc.) that is in some reusable form.How best can you describe the role that IT plays in your company’s work processes? Storage and retrieval are not the primary ap-plications of IT; IT is considered a great en-abler for communica-tions; applications suchas email and video conferencing are con-sidered the most usefulapplications; conversa-tions, socialization, andexchange of tacit knowledge is consid-ered to be the primary use of IT.Employees are rewarded for us-ing and con-tributing to data-bases such as Notes discus-sion databases.What is your reward structure like? Employees are re-warded for directly sharing their knowl-edge with colleagues and for assisting col-leagues in other loca-tions or offices with their problems.Employees referto a document or best practicesdatabase that stores, distrib-utes, and col-lects codified knowledge.How is knowledge exchanged and transferred? Knowledge is trans-ferred person-to-per-son; intra-firm network-ing is encouraged to enable sharing of tacit knowledge, insight, ex-perience, and intuition.Economies of scale lie in the effective reuse of existing knowledge and Where do your company’s economies of scale lie? Economies rest in the sum total of expertise available within the company; experts in various areas of spe-3experience and applying them tosolve new prob-lems and com-plete new projects. cialization are consid-ered indispensable.Large teams; most members are junior level employees; a few project managers lead them.What are your typical team structure demographics? Junior employees are not an inordinate pro-portion of a typical team’s total member-ship.Andersen Con-sulting, The Gartner Group, Delphi Consult-ing, ZDNET, Delta Airlines, and Oracle. What company’s services do your company’s services resemble? The Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey and Company, Rand Cor-poration.Pizza Hut, Dell Computer, Gateway, Microsoft, SAP, People Soft, Baan, America Online, Bell South, Air TouchCellular, Lotus, SAS Institute, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intra-netics and 3COM.What companies products do your company’s products resemble? A custom car or bicyclemanufacturer, Boeing, a contract research firm and a private in-vestigator. Total weight Add weights in the two