L.E.K. Consulting: Enterprise Knowledge Management – LINK

Quoin built a knowledge management system for L.E.K Consulting, a global strategy and management consulting firm. LINK is an enterprise application that enables users to contribute documents via a drag-and-drop desktop tool bar or web-based form. The application will automatically detect if the document exists in LINK, and allow the user to update the repository. A user categorizes a document using company-specific content taxonomies for geographic scope, industry, and service line. LINK also supports additional document metadata – client project, contributors, attachments, and other important characteristics. Overall, this process is designed to facilitate rapid contribution of new or updated documents.

LINK provides a number of features to enable communication and collaboration at L.E.K. Users can subscribe to weekly digests of new documents or other content for specific industries, service lines, or Communities of Practice. A discussion forum allows users to post questions and target others with specific experience. LINK supports a number of Community of Practice portals that deliver content on best practices, client projects, case studies, and other material. The system currently implements portals for Retail, Life Sciences, Transport, Media and Entertainment practices. However, LINK is designed to allow an administrator to easily create new portals, including customized layout and content queries.

A quick search supports simple “Google-style” search terms and phrases. Users can also search via an advanced search form that provides the capability to filter the search results by certain metadata, including office, content type, date contributed, geographic scope, industry, and service line. All searches involve the use of stop words, stemming, wildcards, and other best practices for optimizing search results. The system integrates related client projects, personnel, and discussions into the search results. The result is a highly effective search feature that presents comprehensive and relevant results in a single page of categorized results.

Quoin worked closely with the consulting, technology, and knowledge management stakeholders on this project throughout the project. Our focus was on designing and implementing features to ensure that LINK supported effective knowledge capture, retention, and reuse as its staff work on client projects. In this 12-month development project, our team delivered the application on time, at a fixed-cost, and with remarkably few operational defects.