PRICEWATERHOUSECOOPERS CASE STUDY

PricewaterhouseCooper (PwC) is a global professional services firm. It employs

approximately 150,000 people, spread among most of the countries of the world.
Thirty-one thousand people are employed in management consultancy services
(MCS). PwCs other business units are audit, assurance and business advisory
services, business process outsourcing, financial advisory services, global HR
solutions and tax and legal services. As it is a partnership organisation, the profit
motive and financial responsability are widespread.
The organisation is divided between three theatres of operation: the Americas;
Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA); and Asia/Pacific (APAC). They are
united by global top management and extensive relationship between players in
different theatres.
The sectors in which PwC operates are gradually being dominated by a few very
large firms, formed through a series of mergers, of which PWc is one. PwC was
formed in mid-1998 by a merger between Price Waterhouse and Coopers &
Lybrand. Both organisations had their own cultures and their own KM initiatives,
with different approaches, particularly in management consultancy services. The
objectives of the current knowledge management programme of management
consultancy services in the EMEA theatre are an illustration of the drivers in the
consultancy sector:
merging the abilities, expertise and histories of the two legacy organisations;
creating a consistent delivery of service across different business lines,
sectors and territories;
meeting the need to train constantly replenished cohorts of consultants
supporting the delivery of the MCS business strategy.
Although there are wide variations in employees understanding of KM, the
consistent view is that the process needs to be embedded in the business. KM at
PwC encompasses:

culture change, towards information and knowledge capture and sharing;

process change, towards innovation;
information management, via integration of resources;
information service delivery, through staff expertise in the business and
information retrieval.

The focus of PwCs KM activities was initially on explicit knowledge capture and
cultural change oriented towards improving consultants ability and willingness to
contribute and re-use what they learn on assignments, resulting in three separate
areas of KM activity:
the 11 business units within MCS, each of which has it own Knowledge
Manager;
a core MCS KM team, largely staffed from the UK and USA but working
through all three theatres of operation;
a global KM team working for the whole of the organisation, based in the
USA.
In addition, the EMEA theatre has a central knowledge management help desk
called Knowledge Point, based in London. There is a well-developed appreciation
of the importance of taxonomy or classification, and many roles include a focus on
information architecture.
The measure of succes in a management consultancy is in delivering workable
solutions to clients. The turnover of staff in management consultancy (not just at
PwC) is very high, aspecially amongst the non-partner consultants, but the
capability of a consultancy team is crucial. The significance of the KM initiative at
PwC MCS is in its approach to:
ambeddes knowledge-sharing behaviours within the business units through
unit-based knowledge brokers working closely with the consultants;
support from the core team for rules and tools to enable knowledge
sharing;
the building of some elements of KM skills into the corporate competency
framework.