Microsoft Consulting Services

Sharing the Wealth: Microsoft Consultants Save Thousands of Hours and Realize Increased Productivity Thanks to Global Information Sharing

Solution Overview Customer Profile Microsoft Corporation’s Enterprise Knowledge Management (eKM) solution allows 40,000 employees worldwide to share their experiences and expertise with others who work on similar technical issues. Business Situation With numerous disconnected document repositories, employees weren’t able to fully research a topic or learn from the experts. And without the guidance offered by shared knowledge, engagement with customers often took longer than anticipated. Solution eKM was developed by Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS), to serve as a “knowledge community” where people with common interests and goals can share and solve common issues and problems. In a recent four-week period, the eKM team recorded more than 10,000 downloads and an average research time savings of four to eight hours per document. Software and Services • Microsoft Index Server • Office 2000 • Microsoft Consulting Services

Company Overview

Microsoft, celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2000, is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. What began in 1975 with three employees and first-year revenues of US$16,005 has grown into the world's largest software company, with 39,904 employees worldwide and revenues of US$22.96 billion. The company’s latest initiative, Microsoft.NET (pronounced "dot-net"), is a new platform, user experience and set of advanced software services that will make all devices work together and connect seamlessly. Internet-based computing and communications will be easier to use, more personalized, and more productive for businesses and consumers.

Over the past decade, Microsoft has built a successful consulting business to address the full range of customer and partner needs. Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) has 82 practices, eight specialized practices including Technology Solutions, Government and Retail, and Financial Services, and more than 2,500 consultants worldwide. MCS provides services on enterprise application planning, advanced technology, e-commerce, distributed network architecture computing and customized client solutions, among others. MCS focuses on driving business value through technology innovation by transferring knowledge, satisfying customers and collaborating with solution providers.

Business Challenge

Microsoft takes great pride in helping employees develop a challenging career with opportunities for growth. One of the company’s most important initiatives in this area is Knowledge Management, enabling employees to capture and reuse the tacit knowledge of thousands of colleagues around the world. The result: a faster, smarter and more competitive global workforce.

Microsoft operates a successful Knowledge Management practice to help companies deliver information and expertise to the people who need it. But until recently, Microsoft’s internal Knowledge Management practice lacked a clear vision. The company’s primary document repository, dubbed Insight, had an onerous submission and approval process and, as a result, online documents were often out of date and therefore not being embraced by employees.

Because Insight was not linked to other company repositories created by individual groups, employees could never be sure they had found all related information on a particular topic. The sites were difficult to navigate, causing people to spend an inordinate amount of time searching for documents or sourcing other people who were working on similar projects.

But frustration wasn’t the only byproduct. Because Microsoft consultants lacked the guidance offered by shared knowledge, their engagement with customers often took longer than anticipated. If it took four or five days to find a particular report or document related to a specific project, it took that much longer to execute a client’s project.

“We knew anecdotally that our technical field staff possessed great knowledge – knowledge that others could leverage to be successful in their daily work,” says Michael Ohata, platform product manager of the Microsoft e^KM team. “But they captured a fair amount of this knowledge in an explicit form: semi-structured content such as documents and e-mail. By making this knowledge available to others in a structured and supervised manner, employees would become much more productive and efficient.”

Take the example of a Microsoft consultant whose client wanted to route messages from the Internet between Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes. If the consultant had never been involved in such a project before, he or she might have spent a week or two figuring out the process. But according to Jeff Newfeld, principal consultant at Microsoft Consulting Services’ Exchange Connectivity Competency Center (EC3), the process has been done “about 1,000 times” and there’s documentation out there to prove it. With the right tools, though, customer service could be vastly improved.

“If the consultant had no way of finding that document, he’d have no way of reusing someone else’s knowledge,” says Newfeld, a subject matter expert for the e^KM Messaging community. “By implementing a shared knowledge repository, our consultants would be able to execute projects faster because they wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. They can do their jobs better, save time, and gain back that lost evening or weekend.”

Deployment Process

In June 1999, Microsoft Consulting Services set the stage for the e^KM initiative. Representatives from nine Microsoft districts and subsidiaries around the world were called upon to define the requirements and drive the overall solution design. The consensus was to build “knowledge communities” where people with common interests and goals could share and solve common issues and problems.

“Knowledge communities and the supporting platform provide the structure to do Knowledge Management naturally: to submit knowledge, share it, reuse it, and to collaborate with a global community,” explains Ohata.

The e^KM Design Team identified the most popular areas of discussion and settled on six core technical and solution-based communities: Messaging, Directory Services and Operating Systems, Distributed Applications, Database Applications and Data Warehousing, Platform Management, and Electronic Commerce. One person was appointed in each community to coordinate the collection of documents, reports and related material from a variety of sources.

By July 1999, Microsoft began a two-month pilot to test the e^KM strategy on EC3, a division of Microsoft Consulting Services. EC3 consultants were able to search for multi-language reports, articles, white papers, presentations and other documents through a number of methods: by technology, project type, project phase and industry or by author, contributor, key word or full text. “Knowledge Gems” – articles deemed the most informative – are flagged for quick reference. EC3 consultants quickly realized tremendous timesavings and were much more productive and proactive in their daily tasks.

Based on the enthusiastic response, the e^KM solution was launched to the entire Microsoft community in September 1999. Several role- and business-based communities have been added including Practice Management, Technology Strategy Consulting, and MCS Business Operations.

The full-time coordinator in each community is supported by several subject matter experts, who act as top-level technical authorities. Among their tasks, these experts review documents to ensure their technical accuracy, host monthly conference calls with other communities, and act as general resources to the rest of the community

We knew anecdotally that our technical field staff possessed great knowledge – knowledge that others could leverage to be successful in their daily work. …By making this knowledge available to others in a structured and supervised manner, employees would become much more productive and efficient. Michael Ohata Platform product manager of the Microsoft eKM team Microsoft Corp.

Solution

To access e^KM, Microsoft employees “join” the communities that interest them. Members access a community through the HomeSpace portal, bringing people together in a global way through collaboration and community events. The member page provides automatic synchronization between the e^KM member store and Global Address List (GAL) using Active Directory service technology. As a member’s personal information changes, corresponding information is automatically updated.

The HomeSpace supports Personal Content Management, providing the ability to replace content with updated versions, change the metadata tagging of submissions, and update content’s abstract so other community members can evaluate its value immediately. Subject matter experts can manage workflow around the review of content nominated as a best practice or Knowledge Gem and can monitor the status of content in the Gem review process.

The e^KM platform runs on Windows 2000, SQL Server 7.0, Index Server, and Office 2000. Future plans call for e^KM to move to Tahoe, the code name for Microsoft’s upcoming Knowledge Management/document management server.

Business Benefits

e^KM Messaging Community leader Laura Payne, whose community numbers more than 850 worldwide members, has seen a drastic change in business practices since e^KM was launched. For the first time, disparate groups at Microsoft are coming together to work on similar projects simply because they are now aware of each other.

“There has been a marked increase in collaboration and networking between the technical field in different districts, regions and offices around the world,” she says. “And there has definitely been more communication between the technical field and the product groups, which are usually hard groups to bring together.”

To best capture the success of e^KM, weekly vitality reports provide summarized data regarding individual, community, and district/office participation. The HomeSpace tracks document downloads. Members are prompted one week later to see if they have reused the content, asking for an evaluation of its reusability.

“Time saved is money saved,” says Payne. “When people are sharing their best practices and there’s an easy place to go to find information that’s relevant to their daily jobs, it saves them time. And any time saved clearly provides tangible benefits for the employees as well as the company.”

In a recent four-week period, the e^KM team recorded more than 10,000 downloads and an average research time savings of four to eight hours per document.

An e^KM Recognition Program rewards employees in several categories, including most submissions, most Knowledge Gems submitted, most reuse realized, and most overall participation.

Resulting Value

With so much knowledge at their fingertips, employees are eager to take on new challenges. The resulting value, of course, is better customer service.

“The community is a true blessing for consultants all across the company,” reports a Microsoft employee. “New hires are asking very different questions – they’re more detailed and more technical than they were previously – because they are better able to find information. Customer deliverables are easier to produce since there are higher quality materials that can be used to support the generation of client documents. And, once again, I can now find them easier than I ever thought possible.”

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products or services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information via the World Wide Web, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/canada/casestudies/

Top of page