Ideas.com

Virtually speaking, IAN lets Ward, and everyone else at Context, open their notebooks -- so that others can react to the information recorded there. IAN serves as a marketplace of ideas. It's a digital brainstorming center in which all ideas, even half-baked ones, are welcome. After all, it's hard to predict which suggestion will trigger a chain of thought that leads to the next big thing. "It's that interplay with other people that helps an idea take a quantum leap," says Ward. "We want to foster that kind of communication and to capture it as it happens." That's why people are encouraged to ask IAN a question -- any question, whether or not it's urgent. IAN eavesdrops on the conversations that such questions generate, records participants' input in a discussion thread, and then disseminates that knowledge to people who want it.

In other words, IAN doesn't wait for you to come to it -- it comes to you. The system is "in your face," Durham says. Each morning, for example, customized electronic newsletters go out to consultants who subscribe to them. The system distributes only those kinds of ideas and information that users ask for. This approach avoids information glut, which Durham regards as one of "the enemies of knowledge management."

Newsletter topics range from particular technologies, to Web-development platforms such as BroadVision and SilverStream, to colleagues whose work a consultant wants to follow. For example, if a consultant is interested in corba (common object request broker architecture), she will receive a message linking her to the latest corba material that IAN has generated. This newsletter might refer to a trade-journal article, to a question posted by a colleague, or to a posting by Tony Lanzilloti, 39, a technology manager who is an expert in corba. To read a question, subscribers must follow a link to the discussion area. Why the extra step? To encourage users to reply in IAN, rather than by phone, so that their ideas can be captured and shared. "They understand right out of the gate that IAN is not all about 'take, take, take,' " Ward says. "There's an individual responsibility, a social responsibility, to give back."

Do You Know What You Know?

Competing on ideas is an extremely demanding way to work. Companies, and the people in them, are expected to generate cutting-edge innovations at a steady clip, to execute those innovations flawlessly, and then to produce quick results. Indeed, one of the defining questions in business is "How do we do great work fast?" One of the best answers is "Wherever possible, avoid reinventing the wheel."

IAN is an idea-recycling center. Teams at Context begin every new project by searching IAN for past work that's similar to what they're doing, looking for ideas and practices that they can borrow. The goal is to use anything -- models, architecture, source code -- that helps them avoid duplicating another team's work.

Last year, when Context approached BMG Distribution, the $4 billion subsidiary of Bertelsmann AG, it didn't waste any time making an impression. BMG wanted to build a Web site to handle sales and marketing activities with distributors and retailers across the country. It was no small undertaking: BMG moves more than 600,000 units daily to music, CD-ROM, and video retailers. Context was a latecomer to the developer-selection process, but it promised to deliver a proposal within 48 hours. Its consultants conducted an intensive workshop with BMG's information-technology and marketing people, to learn more about what BMG wanted the site to do. Then, after combing through IAN, they produced a proposal that would otherwise have taken weeks to prepare.

"You could tell that they had put a lot of thought into the proposal," says Anthony Marino, project manager for applications development at BMG. "They didn't just show a slide or two. They had documents: 'This is how we're going to give you what you want. These are the people we're going to assign to it. This is why we can do the job.' " Last January, Context was in San Diego when BMG Distribution introduced its new Web portal, BMG Central, at its annual convention -- right on schedule.

Open Minds Beat Closed Systems

Context is in the knowledge business -- but it doesn't pretend to have a monopoly on good ideas. There are plenty of consulting firms and software-development companies that go to clients with an attitude that says, "We're smarter than you." Why else, they figure, would a client hire them in the first place? Context exudes a different attitude. "When we do a project, we don't do it to you, we do it with you," says Shahid Khan, 27, a client manager who runs Context's media practice. Adds Dror Liwer, 31, the firm's New York - practice director: "We've had clients ask us not to use the C-word -- 'consulting' -- because it has such a negative vibe. There can be tremendous distrust, because consultants usually hide so much from their clients."