International trends indicate that companies leveraging knowledge as a means to generate income will rule the corporate roost in the 21st century, however, only a few local players have begun to take note.Chief among these is Deloitte & Touche, which has implemented Lotus Notes groupware in its offices nationwide in a bid to effectively manage its knowledge assets. Emil Urban, National Groupware Administrator, Deloitte & Touche, says local adoption of Notes was spurred on by a group decision to use the product to access and share information on a national and global level."We currently have a suite of applications containing reference material and business practices (the Knowledge Network) that are accessed and available to our consultants whenever necessary," he says. Urban explains that the Knowledge Network suite of applications is 90% of the databases on the Notes infrastructure. These databases are used by Deloitte & Touche Consulting Group.The Knowledge Network is a collection of databases containing information on Deloitte Consulting people, engagements, methods, research, service lines, industries, deliverables, and best practices. The system is based on Lotus Notes v4, and uses a graphical interface for easy navigation. It is accessible from engagement sites via a modem and is available 24 hours a day.The Knowledge Network was introduced in South Africa on February 28, 1997 and is being implemented globally during this year.Today, the system contains information on practitioners, engagement summaries, research services, best practices, firm communications, and methodologies. Additional components which will be introduced over the next few months include project deliverables and marketing materials. Richard Woock, MD of Lotus Business partner, Collaborative Business Solutions, consulted on the implementation. He says that with Notes, Deloitte & Touche is now able to use up to date, relevant and globally shared information to adopt best practices whenever approaching a new project.Urban adds that Deloitte & Touche finds Notes useful for project planning and monitoring the status of events. "From a technical point of view the document based, single object store that Notes offers, coupled with its replication abilities, allow us to effect the rapid distribution of information to various registers," he says.To date, Deloitte & Touche has around 600 national users - not concurrent. "Fifty percent of our staff are active users," says Urban, "while the remainder still have to make the transition."In addition to Notes, the firm uses Lotus cc:Mail for messaging. "We`ve been running for three years - it`s also a global standard for the firm," says Urban.Future plans at Deloitte & Touche include the updating of existing databases to make them more user-friendly and more representative of changes in business processes.Last, but not least, the firm is also considering the possible implementation of an intranet within the next 12 months.
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