One of the main difficulties with large companies is that of finding out who's who in the larger organisation-who one's peers are and who is likely to hold knowledge from particular past projects or experience of interest. On the most basic level, even organisation charts can be hard to find. It seems to be common practice for people to send e-mail messages that often contain no indication of their position/discipline, the projects they are working on, or even which office they are based in. In order to try to locate experience elsewhere in the firm, the only readily available mechanism often resorted to is sending e-mail messages to all professional staff asking, 'Does anyone know anything about…?' While reasonably effective at eliciting responses, such messages can tend to clutter up the e-mail system and serve as distractions to the majority of recipients who are not knowledgeable in the topic in question. Given the rapid and continuing growth of this case study company in recent years through mergers and acquisitions, the problem of knowing who's who is certain to continue. Since the basic requirement of knowledge management is for people to communicate with each other, in order that they openly share their knowledge, a first step is to facilitate and encourage such communication. Several company-wide elements of a knowledge management system are recommended to help address this problem-some are commonly used, although others should be considered to maximise the benefit of knowledge generated:

• an online database of all staff, their areas of expertise, and so forth-commonly known as a corporate 'Yellow Pages';

• increased establishment and use of technets and newsgroups throughout the organisation, especially to share project-specific knowledge and experiences;

• a database identifying key staff who worked on each project; and

• an intranet that provides a resource for identifying areas of staff expertise and experience. This database (or several linked sub-databases) should contain the following kinds of information: the staff member's name and basic contact details- office, e-mail, phone and fax, their position and discipline; a hot-link to that person's CV; an experience database, using guided keywords, to track their areas of expertise (by role and by market sector); a database listing clients for whom they have worked.

For most companies, this database would be relatively straightforward to establish and to update, and staff should be encouraged to use it as a 'first call' for any technical information about company personnel they require. It is expected that staff would be responsible for ensuring their own details are current, as is the case with CV's, and that staff would be required to regularly check and update details.