It is well accepted that the need to manage knowledge increases proportionately with the service intensity of companies. Service-oriented knowledge intensive companies share some common characteristics: their "products" are intangible, i.e. they do not consist of goods, but of complex non-standardised problem-solving services; their "production process" is non-standardised and highly-dependent on team-work; the majority of their employees are educated and creative people; their customers are treated individually and the "products" are rather adapted to them, than vice versa;.
see e.g. Sveiby (1992 and 1997). Such companies represent a significant component of growth. For example, 50% of the fastest growing companies in the US are knowledge-intensive organisations, in.
the sense that they sell the knowledge and the know-how of their employees rather than manufactured products or provide services, while the so-called business service sector contributes about 14% of the total European value added and 6% of the GNP, which makes it a larger sector than agriculture. Examples of such companies include, but are not limited to: advertising; management consulting; financial or legal advice; nursing care; software programming and systems design; etc. Management consulting firms are considered typical examples of highly knowledge-intensive companies since: they depend heavily on the expertise of their people; focus on customer relations; employ network architectures, i.e. confederations of professionals engaged in value-added/creativity-added work; the nature of their assignments is team-based and mainly project-focused; and they put considerable.
emphasis on applied creativity for solving the problems of their clients. Hence consulting companies should have been in the forefront of thinking about how to manage knowledge. However, at a time when a growing number of companies are seeking the advice and counsel of management consultants on how to deploy technology to enhance collaboration within increasingly dispersed organisations,.
