Time Warner

Context

One of the UK's most successful publishing companies, part of Time Warner is no stranger to information management. But,they knew that effective information management does not always mean great insight. They also knew that the quality of insight was critical to their strategic planning, product innovation, distribution and customer experience.

The challenge was to utilise available information effectively and to introduce better ways to deliver better insight.

Insight

Although it's perhaps obvious it's the quality and combination of ideas, experience and debate that develop insight. Accurate data and information is vital but being able to craft concepts based on available information and interpreting facts to develop imaginative scenarios is what it's all about.

To do this people need to be involved, different people with different experiences and different perceptions of the risks and opportunities need to be able to interpret and share knowledge. To improve performance of these 'processes' deeper understanding about the sources, types of and uniqueness of knowledge is required and how people and systems produce, share and consume knowledge.

Knowing more than anyone else is a key differentiation of considerable business value, but it's arguably more important that the corporate memory is accessible by a broad range of staff and that the organisation is able to recall and develop imaginative scenarios based on what it knows.

Solution

We worked with over sixty key stakeholders over a four week period isolating strengths and weaknesses in explicit and tacit knowledge transfer. Using a combination of brand intellect Rapid Diagnostic tools developed specifically for this programme and a series of 'face to face' working sessions we were able to quickly identify key priorities and set actions to help the marketing organisation transition from information to insight management.

Benefits

Our approach allowed our client to pinpoint specific strengths and weaknesses in insight and knowledge strategy, culture, relationships, organisation, process, information and technology. It provided:

• Deeper understanding of core insight development capabilities.
• New ways to accurately and quickly assess insight and knowledge management performance.
• Clearly prioritised action plans to improve knowledge sharing.
• Performance and 'self assessment' measurement systems for ongoing improvement.