Consulting Model

Starting in 1992, I began developing a consulting model to help organizations make strategic investment decisions, especially as they pertain to document and knowledge management initiatives. It integrates a variety of process, technology, and policy development methods to bridge the gaps between traditional IT and management consulting practices.

My writings describe portions of this consulting approach at varying (sometimes excrutiating) levels of detail. This summary is intended to provide a relatively succinct description of the problems that this approach is intended to address, some of the methods and and techniques that comprise the consulting model, typical service areas, and expected impacts.

This consulting model was developed to deal with many of the issues that prevent organizations from migrating to emerging document management, knowledge management, and business models:

• Knowledge gaps
• Organizational misalignment, communication breakdowns, and associated cultural problems
• Decision-making and policy development deficiencies, including implicit policy-making by technologists
• Hiden political forces and resistence to change
• Conceptualization issues and breakdowns, especially those that are associated with complex and highly dynamic business problems, opportunities, and solution spaces

In addition to traditional engineering and software development methods the consulting model is based on a variety of specialized techniques, including:

• Engineering of social decisions
  • Integration of stakeholder values, interests, and knowledge assets
  • Values-based decision-making
  • Informal brokering of agreements
  • Formal facilitation of decision-making processes
  • Distribution of decision-making authories and definition of protocols (governance)
• Knowledge engineering
  • Identification and articulation of the semantic and behavioral value of knowledge artifacts throughout targeted knowledge flows
  • Design of metadata and knowledge representation schemes to preserve and amplify critical semantic properties
  • Design of knowledge creation, retention, and transfer mechanisms
  • Development of ontologies to formalize the terminology and semantics associated with conceptual domains
• Alignment theory
  • Assessment and creation of conceptual alignments
  • Permission-giving organizational models
  • Paradigm obsolescence and displacement
  • Differentiation of engineered and organic optimization points

Revised 2001.08.05