The document discusses knowledge management challenges at Ernst & Young and proposes concepts for a wearable device to help address them. It describes: 1) Knowledge management problems consultants face within and across projects related to accessing industry expertise and coordinating knowledge across locations and teams. 2) Early concepts for a wearable device that scans work environments to locate people with relevant expertise or shares information via name tags. 3) Understanding the daily life of consultants through personas, scenarios, and typical projects/deliverables. 4) Testing community responses to prototype queries, finding specific questions garner more engagement.

1. Thesis: Knowledge Management Systems Thesis Studio: Fall 2009 Amber Krishan | MFA DT

2. Domains & Precedents Knowledge management Wearable and computer vision technologies Competitive Advantage Imperative competitive Advantage Efficient information collection, processing & dispersion Embracing modern technologies Financial Consultancies

3. What is Knowledge Management? Information Collection from real world experiences Processing information into knowledge Contextual Knowledge Distribution ORGANIZATION WORLD

6. Key Question? How can knowledge be leverages across the organization ?

7. The Need Knowledge is stored in databases and archives! Users find it hard to familiarize to all of these. Corporate environment does not support or facilitate conversation, rather enforces technologies which create a social divide. Knowledge in all its granularity resides within the minds of the employees. Don’t make me search through archives! I just need to ask someone. I just don’t know who!

8. Early Concepts  Wearable device scans the work environment to locate people with similar focus of work.

9. Early Concepts  Name tag type devices swapping relevant information  Device with knob type control to set focus of search to particular service lines

10. Understanding the life of consultant – Daily Life Model Typical Day at E&Y (for a typical manager) Reach workstation and switch on the PC/laptop Reach out to colleagues and typical morning greeting Read through the mail / scan through the list of thing to do Reach out to team and understand the overall plan of the day Address priority clients first and subsequently allocate the work amongst the team Keep the internal messenger on to reach out to team (outside locations) to administer progress During the day – connect on conference calls, video conferencing and attend meetings with the partner to appraise him of the progress Work on the deliverable through the day Evening – Follow up on the pending issues and try to adjust the timelines for deliverables

12. Understanding the life of consultant – Typical knowledge management problems Faced within Projects Faced across organization Issues Applicable to Thesis Focus Getting to understand the best practices for the industry/Lack of industry specific information ✗ Working with different teams having different competencies and knowledge base (person specific knowledge base e.g. – a person may be good in X but he might not be good in Y kind of work, but because overall since he knows a little bit of both X and Y he is in the team) ✔ Lack of system integrity to dispense knowledge amongst teams working across locations (E.g – mail size of ppts are huge and the network esp remote networks cannot cope with the same) ✔ Scattered knowledge platforms proving a hindrance to completion ✔ EY doesn’t always subscribe to key information/research information portals to ease out on knowledge management challenges ✗ Reaching out to internal knowledge sharing platforms (poor connectivity) ✗ Non – updation of the internal knowledge platform ✗ Lack of sharing amongst teams – Data is privy to most of the teams ✔ Absence of e-learning modules for some of the key deliverables ✗ Absence of real time updation of project completion status and bottlenecks ✗ Absence of real time solutions for the bottlenecks faced ✔ These challenges are consistent across service lines ✗

17. Next Steps Continue further research Further ideation Explore possible technologies early on