Click-and-Mortar Consulting Firms’s Internal Knowledge Visualization Research

Since China has launched a series of policies to optimize the industrial structure, the tertiary industry scale is expanding, and a set of continuous technology, process, product, service innovation and even great strategic change are taking place accordingly. Thus it’s a thought-provoking problem for the consulting firm, an important part of the tertiary industry, that how to adjust itself to balance the growing market demands and its limited resources so as to meet complicated consulting projects and the diverse needs of customers.Virtual organization was introduced in an attempt to solve this problem. In virtual organization, members across the time and distance and organizational boundaries cooperate with others to accomplish the working tasks through the use of information technology. Based on the consultancy industry macro-environment and SWOT analysis about virtual consulting organization and traditional real organization, this paper proposes author’s own viewpoint that both organizational structures should learn from each other’s strengths to offset its own weaknesses and then build a new business model which is called click-and-morter. As present organization theory concentrates on stationary organization structure study, enterprises which are carrying on the organizational structure transformation get less direct guidance from the corresponding theory. With that in mind, the first part of this thesis reviews and summarizes theories of virtual organization, structure transformation and inter-organizational relationship, then makes a further study on how consulting firms coping with structure transformation from real-only to click-and-morter. In summary, this part focuses on stages to effect innovations and also presents elaborate details about click-and-morter consulting firms business processes and operating mechanisms, which is significant both in theory and in practice.Knowledge visualization has proven to be an effective strategy for making knowledge explicit and better usable, as well as to make sense of information structures. Regarding the new organizational structure features, more effective knowledge communication and sharing are in urgent requirement in click-and-morter consulting firms. Therefore, a breakthrough on visualizations of internal knowledge is absolutely vital. Knowledge map, an important way of visualization, can facilitate consulting project knowledge sharing and also provide knowledge visualized retrieval for project members located around the globe to supply rapidly services. Based on full study of current research, the second part of the thesis provides an ontology-based knowledge map framework. To implement this model in practice, first the information has to be pre-indexed, then the author improves traditional ontology construction and maintenance, finally by combining the ontology technology and the information retrieval method the key processes are realized and core problems of this method are discussed in detail. In the end, the dissertation concludes innovativeness and shortcomings the research results and the further research problems, and carries on the prospects.