Managing knowledge in global service firms: Centers of excellence

Academy of Management Executive

Volumn 12, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 81-92

  Moore, Karl ^a   Birkinshaw, Julian ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

^b STOCKHOLM SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS   (Sweden)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0002840760     PISSN: 10795545     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5465/ame.1998.1333973     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. Electra is a disguised name.
2. While we use the term center of excellence exclusively in this article, it should be clear that the firms in our study used a plethora of names to describe the same phenomenon. These included: center of competence, community of practice, best practice, capability center, and future center.
3. We define service firms as those whose primary value-added to customers is in the form of an intangible service, rather than in the transformation of inputs into a physical product. In terms of service firms studied in this research, our focus is on the consulting, insurance, banking, shipping, engineering, publishing, and information technology industries.
4. Though there are certainly opportunities even within service firms to benefit from cost differences between countries. Back-office activities are frequently located in low-cost countries, and even in professional activities there are benefits to be gained from tapping into well-educated but relatively low-salary countries such as Ireland.
5. Knowledge management is currently receiving a lot of research attention. See I. Nonaka and H. Takeuchi, The Knowledge Creating Company, 1995, Oxford University Press;
6. G. Hedlund, A Model of Knowledge Management and the N-Form Corporation, Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 15, 1995.
7. Knowledge can also be gained through external non-client relationships and through conferences and journals, but much of this knowledge is essentially a public good, so it offers no potential for competitive advantage unless it can somehow be transformed by the firm.
8. See C. A. Bartlett and S. Ghoshal, 1986, Tap your subsidiaries for global reach, Harvard Business Review.
9. These two models parallel the ethnocentric and polycentric models described in: Perlmutter, H. 1969. The Tortuous Evolution of the Multinational Corporation. Columbia Journal of World Business, 4: 9-18. The next two are variants of his geocentric model.
10. ABA Banking Journal. 1992. An interview with Craig Goldman of Chase Manhattan. March 1992: 62.
11. Codification is a process through which tacit knowledge, that which is personal, context-specific and hard to formalize, becomes explicit, i.e. transmittable in formal, systematic language.
12. Bartlett, C.A. 1996. McKinsey and Company. Harvard Business School Publishing, Case study 396-357.
13. It is interesting to compare virtual centers to communities of practice, which are emergent bodies of professionals drawn together by common interests and experiences. In many ways the two are quite similar, but they differ in two important ways: (a) virtual centers have a clear deliverable, while communities of practice do not; and (b) communities of practice are by definition unformalized learning groups, whereas virtual centers are an attempt to structure interaction between people. See: Stewart, T. 1997. Intellectual Capital. Nicholas Brealey: London.
14. In this regard, virtual centers could perhaps be better called spheres or webs of excellence, in the sense that they are interconnected, flexible, and quickly adopted to new demands.
15. Nelson, R. and Winter, S. 1982. An evolutionary theory of economic change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
16. One consulting company we studied, for example, had an impressive project database, but when anyone tried to use it their search typically resulted in a deluge of mostly useless material, or none at all. Quality control in such databases is still very hard to achieve.