business management
Knowledge
MAPPING How competitive are your firm’s assets?
F
or consulting engineering firms, knowledge assets are a source of competitive advantage in the marketplace. These assets, also known as intellectual capital, include a company’s human capital (i.e. the skill, knowledge and experience of its employees), structural capital (processes, systems and patents) and customer capital (relationships with and knowledge of customers). Such assets may be rated as core (basic to ‘playing the game’), advanced (making the firm competitively viable) or innovative (enabling the firm to lead in the industry, to the extent it is differentiated from its competitors). To remain competitive, a firm needs to continually compare the status of its knowledge assets against those
20
www.canadianconsultingengineer.com
CCE_May 2020_AMS.indd 20
of other companies and make any changes as necessary. To do this, the firm must first identify its competitors, then rate both its own and their knowledge assets on the aforementioned scale, awarding one point for core, three for advanced and five for innovative. These ratings help a company to characterize itself within the marketplace relative to its competitors using ‘knowledge mapping’ (see Figure 1). Going through the process By way of example, an international consulting engineering and environmental science firm used knowledge mapping as part of a self-assessment process to investigate the competitive status of its knowledge assets within eight technical disciplines in one of its major offices.
Each discipline-specific leader identified three to six of their top competitors and rated their knowledge assets. The average rating of their own assets was 3.56, while that of their competitors’ assets was 2.8. Indeed, with only one exception among 33 comparisons, the leaders rated their assets equal or superior to those of their competitors. All eight disciplines within the office were either competent competitors or market leaders. The knowledge mapping process stimulated additional thoughts about the firm and its competitors, e.g. “Company X was a five, but their acquisition lowered them to three or four,” “Company Y has a morale problem and is losing good employees,” and “Our own company is untried in
©vegefox.com - stock.adobe.com
By Bryan Leach, P. Eng.
May 2020
2020-05-01 11:57 AM
