Knowledge sharing is a chance-management exercise.

• Author: Holub, Steven F.

What is knowledge management to a CPA firm? It is taking the staff's completed work efforts and capturing that information in one location for centralized retrieval and reuse by the entire firm. Why is this beneficial? Knowledge sharing increases the speed of giving deliverables to clients, improves work quality and leads to innovative thinking.

Knowledge Management Is for Everybody

Unmistakable differences exist among small and large CPA firms. Although small and large firms have a multitude of distinctions between them, to a large extent these differences disappear in the area of knowledge management. Regardless of firm size, all firms need to capture knowledge for reuse. In minimizing information overload and maximizing content usability, they can decrease time, effort and cost. In getting examples of quality client work to their practitioners, firms take a vital step in building their practices.

CPAs can improve service delivery and bring more value to their clients by leveraging the best practices of all practitioners. In turn, everyone benefits from the work others do. In today's accounting environment of increased risk, a knowledge-management solution can counteract and help decrease risk.

The Mindset

To share information, a firm must first adopt a knowledge-enabled culture. People make up the culture of any organization. They are the primary facilitators in the effective flow of knowledge, and include not only knowledge managers (who have the difficult task of keeping repositories of information current), but also everybody from staff to partner.

Knowledge-management stakeholders must be willing to commit resources. They must also be willing to set goals that encourage information sharing, and to determine and eliminate factors that hinder creating and networking knowledge. This is not an easy task, especially when knowledge has been hoarded, rather than shared. As a result, change management comes into play.

Managing Change

Change management, in its simplest form, is the process of managing change. When a firm has been carrying out its procedures the same way for as long as anyone can remember, it often meets resistance to change. The process of learning how to embrace change begins with awareness of the knowledge-sharing concept and culminates in educating others, which increases the level of learning over time (see Exhibit 1 at right).

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Through communication and training, everybody achieves a general...