Making knowledge visible: Using expert yellow pages to map capabilities in professional services firms

Professional services firms survive by exploiting the skills and knowledge of their employees to deliver a range of projects for clients. As a result of working on these projects, an organization's capabilities evolve in unpredictable and often divergent ways. In order to help their staff conduct these projects, services firms have invested heavily in knowledge management systems. To date, few attempts have been made to use the information contained in these knowledge management systems to understand the nature and evolution of capabilities in professional services firms. Using the expert yellow pages of Arup, one of the world's leading engineering consultancies, we develop a new approach based on co-word and proximity analysis to map the knowledge and skills of professional services firms. This approach provides a mechanism to allow such firms to better understand what they know and help them to deploy their skills in new and potentially lucrative ways.