Kunskap & strategi : En studie av strategisk kongruens mellan affärs- och kunskapsstrategi i managementkonsultföretag

Sammanfattning: This study examines how management consulting firms work with business- and functional strategy and how these strategies are interrelated. More specifically we focus on business strategy (business unit level) and knowledge strategy (functional level) and whether these are aligned or not, i.e. whether strategic congruence exists. A number of recent studies have examined the importance of business strategy and knowledge strategy in management consulting firms separately, but few have pointed out the importance of the alignment between them. With this study we contribute to the strategic field of research with a model that describes how management consulting firms should work with their knowledge strategy given their business strategy. The model is developed through a synthesis between theories in the field of strategic congruence, business- and functional strategies and thereafter tested by an empirical case study of six management consulting firms. Our main contribution with the model is the finding that the degree of customization is a determining factor of what type of knowledge strategy the firm should undertake. Given a high degree of customization we argue that it is strategic congruent to put an emphasis on personalization as the firms knowledge strategy. With a similar logic we argue that when the degree of customization is lower, the firm should focus on a knowledge strategy like codification. Further, in contrast with former studies, our findings show that it is strategic congruent to work with personalization and codification parallelly. Through our analysis we found that it is strategic congruent to put an emphasis on either personalization or codification in different project phases. We propose that it is a good fit to focus on codification in the beginning of a management consulting project and conversely focus more on personalization in the latter part. In contrast with earlier studies, we can not see why it should be harmful to focus on both strategies parallelly, given that this focus changes over time in a project. Finally, an interesting finding of our case studies is that all of the researched firms want to codify more knowledge and it seems to be easier today than for ten years ago to motivate consultants to codify their knowledge.