Carme Martínez Costa

Exploring critical success factors of knowledge management projects in the consulting sector

Knowledge management (KM) and critical success factors (CSFs) are interesting issues in the current business world. Knowledge is an important driving force for business success and competiveness, especially in the consulting industry whose core business is to sell knowledge itself. Previous works suggested a positive relation between the CSF and the success of a KM project, but only few of them related it in a quantitative way. This paper aims to identify the CSF in a consulting firm (strategic, cultural and technological factors) and to build a success model for designing KM projects based on these CSF identified. This model was tested using structured equation model. With this study we contribute to recognising the importance of these success factors in a KM project in the consulting industry to achieve the maximum success.

A study of knowledge culture in the consulting industry

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify the values that make up a knowledge‐friendly culture in the consulting industry, in which the implementation of in‐house knowledge management (KM) projects has positive performance outcomes.Design/methodology/approach – An exploratory analysis and a structural equation model were used on a sample of 100 knowledge workers (managers and internal KM project managers) in the consulting sector.Findings – The results of this study indicate that the values identified (trust, transparency, flexibility, collaboration, commitment, honesty and professionalism) bear a close positive relation to the success of the KM project implementation (innovation, employee satisfaction, capabilities, quality and productivity). These values are divided into three groups.Research limitations/implications – This research focuses on the consulting industry in Catalonia, Spain; further research will be required in order to apply the findings to other countries in the world.Practical i...

A MILP Model for the Strategic Capacity Planning in Consultancy

This paper deals with the Strategic Capacity Planning problem in knowledge intensive organizations (KIOs), particularly in consulting firms. Considering different characteristics such as the organization structure, the workforce characteristics, the capacity requirements, the capacity decisions or the evaluation criteria in a consulting company, a model based on MILP is developed to be applied to a particular case.