Consultants and knowledge transfer

"Do you/are you going to include knowledge transfer as a part of value creation?"

someone asked me. But consultants are less purveyors of knowledge than knowledge brokers. They facilitate transfer of knowledge between client parties rather than from themselves to the client. Andrew Sturdy at Warwick knows this. He and his colleagues on an ESRC project spent months doing the sort of research I'd love to do. It was reported here in 2007.

So my thesis will have to explain something about knowledge transfer and knowledge exchange.

Production

I've produced:

1. a rewritten paper on my second case study to my supervisors and
   
2. a review of a really useful new book by Sturdy et al about consultants

And I've marked a couple of early computing assignments.

Next task must be to work on another case study. And to keep looking for access to IT projects in the public sector.

Assumptions about knowledge

• Knowledge transfer is good
• Knowledge transfer happens when people engage
• Knowledge transfer is a requirement for an effective project, assuming that is is more than a one-off decision.
• Knowledge is an undefined form of intellectual capital. It could be a discrete focused subject (Czerniawska, 2002 p91) or one-off or needing updating, or something people will read: scope, type of communication, length of time required. See Czerniawska's figure: the 3 dimensions of access to intellectual capital
• Knowledge is an aspect of uncertainty along with power, but central to management and consultancy (Fincham, 2002)
• "notion of “knowledge transfer” represents the main prescriptive definition of consultancy." (Fincham, 2002: 70)
• asymmetrical between management and consultant
• constructed by some process
• embodied in some expertise
• disseminated somehow

So sometimes I'm assuming and sometimes I can find some academic (like Fincham) who's mentioned aspects of knowledge.

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Czerniawska, F. (2002) The intelligent client: managing your management consultant, Hodder & Stoughton.
FINCHAM, R. (2002) The Agent's Agent. International Studies of Management & Organization, 32, 67-86.

Engagement

I know engagement is a good thing, but I'm not quite clear what it is:

• commitment
• participation
• involvement
• ?
  

If clients must engage with consultants, then what does engagement entail? Here's my comparison of understanding of engagement in the literature.

Category	Citation	Understanding	Comments
Government	.NAO, 2006	Departments lacked engagement with supplier & community Engagement should be both of people in the organisation and among the consultants. Engagement implies gaining enthusiasm and energy to see the project through to conclusion.	..
Government	.NAO, 2006	Engagement leads to commitment, and NAO 1. developed framework for building commitment & 2. made recommendations to improve engagement	..
Government	.NAO, 2006	Conflates senior level engagement and ‘intelligent client’.	thus implying the multi-headedness of the client
Government	.NAO, 2006	Engagement and collaborative relationships are referred to as if synonyms	..
Practitioner	.Czerniawska, 2006	.Argues that extent of engagement between clients and consultants determines the success of consulting projects but doesn’t define engagement.	..
Practitioner	Block, 2000	.Devotes a whole chapter to the term & recommends Axelrod	..
Practitioner	Axelrod, 2007	.Identifies that participation in the sense of compliance is not enough to be involved	.He distinguishes the term as requiring involvement.
Practitioner	.Axelrod, 2006 .	.Axelrod identifies an engagement gap between those who have initiated a project for change and everyone else. An engagement gap can widen between the groups. An ecumenical i.e. inclusive and collective approach, to change theory will narrow that gap.	.Follow up in project research
Academic	.Barki, 1989	.defined and examined user participation	..
Academic	.Barki, 1994 Hartwick, 1994	examined user participation and user involvement	..
Academic	Barki, 1989	.Barki and Hartwick defined user involvement as a psychological state when the user considers a system to be both important and personally relevant	..
Academic	.Hartwick, 1994	Hartwick and Barki talk about involvement “overall responsibility is the most important antecedent of user involvement and attitude toward the system”	..
Academic	Peled, 2001	Peled recommends that management develop interest in technological projects.	..
Academic	Biehl, 2007	.found that top management involvement and real commitment was a success factor in IS project development on big and complex projects	.Biehl refers to commitment as if synonymous with involvement but doesn’t define involvement
Academic	.Fincham, 2002 & 1999	.Fincham refers to engagement in and he uses it in a political context with reference to power games.	Not useful at the moment
Academic	Handley, 2007	.They note a differentiation between participation & engagement: “What seems to be required is a way of differentiating between participation and what Wenger calls ‘mere engagement in practice’ (Wenger, 1998: 75). A key assumption here seems to be that participation involves ‘hearts and minds’”.	This could be a useful section to work from.

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Axelrod, R. H. (2001) 'Why Change Management Needs Changing', Reflections, 2 (3), pp. 46-57. 732
Axelrod, R. H. (2007) 'How to Get Others Involved', Harvard Management Update, 12 (8), pp. 2-2. 743
Axelrod, R. H., Axelrod, E., Jacobs, R. W. and Beedon, J. (2006) 'Beat the Odds and Succeed in Organizational Change', Consulting to Management - C2M, 17 (2), pp. 6-9. 744
Barki, H. and Hartwick, J. (1989) 'Rethinking the Concept of User Involvement', MIS Quarterly, 13 (1), pp. 53-63. 757
Barki, H. and Hartwick, J. (1994) 'Measuring User Participation, User Involvement, and User Attitude', MIS Quarterly, 18 (1), pp. 59-82. 746
Biehl, M. (2007) 'SUCCESS FACTORS for Implementing Global Information Systems', Communications of the ACM, 50 (1), pp. 53-58. 700
Block, P. (2000) Flawless Consulting: a guide to getting your expertise used, (2 Edn), Jossey-Bass/Fpeiffer. 27
Czerniawska, F. (2006). Ensuring sustainable value from consultants. 49
Fincham, R. (1999) 'THE CONSULTANT-CLIENT RELATIONSHIP: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE MANAGEMENT OF ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE', Journal of Management Studies, 36 (3), pp. 335-351. 522
Fincham, R. (2002) 'The Agent's Agent', International Studies of Management & Organization, 32 (4), pp. 67-86. 500
Handley, K., Clark, T., Fincham, R. and Sturdy, A. (2007) 'Researching Situated Learning', Management Learning, 38 (2), pp. 173-191. 458
Hartwick, J. and Barki, H. (1994) 'Explaining the Role of User Participation in Information System Use', Management Science, 40 (4), pp. 440-465. 749
NAO (2006a) Central Government's use of consultants Vol. HC 128 Session 2006-2007 National Audit Office. 577
NAO (2006b) Central Government's use of consultants: Building client and consultant commitment National Audit Office. 109
NAO (2006c) Delivering successful IT-enabled business change Vol. HC 33-1 National Audit Office. 682
NAO (2006d) Good governance: Measuring Success Through Collaborative Working Relationships HMSO. 818<

Agency theory

Agency theory provides a framework for analysing social relationships involving at least two parties where one party expects another to scrutinize their performance (Eisenhardt, 1989). The relationship requires one party (the agent) to give an account of his work to another party (the principal). See Figure 1: Principal Agent Theory

Figure 1: Principal Agent Theory

The principal could be a stakeholder demanding accounts from the public sector manager (the agent). In a public sector context, the principal could be the public sector manager demanding accounts from a consultant (the agent), or, to go further, the stakeholder demanding accounts from the manager (See Figure 2: public agency) following a chain of principal-agent relations (Bovens, 2007).

Figure 2: public agency

Agency theory addresses problems of different goals and of different attitudes to risk (Eisenhardt, 1989). The theory assumes information asymmetry between agent and principal. The unit of analysis is the contract between agent and principal so emphasises the relationship (Fincham, 2002). Agency theory can show relationships in a complex system that involves stakeholder ‘hands’ and ‘eyes’ in a public context.

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Bovens, M. (2007) 'Analysing and Assessing Accountability: A Conceptual Framework', European Law Journal, 13 (4), pp. 447-468. 408
Eisenhardt, K. M. (1989) 'Agency Theory: An Assessment and Review', The Academy of Management Review, 14 (1), pp. 57-74. 520
Fincham, R. (2002) 'The Agent's Agent', International Studies of Management & Organization, 32 (4), pp. 67-86. 500