Professional Service Firms: Knowledge Sharing and Development

Within a business environment that is growing more and more towards intangibility, services and credence goods, Professional Service Firms (PSFs) are increasingly establishing themselves as the thriving, valuable, specialized and knowledge-intensive organizational entity of the future. As a result, the goal of this study is to investigate how knowledge can be developed, shared and managed within Professional Service Firms in a way that is not only coherent and consistent with their organizational values and resources, but that mainly ensures the highly qualified expertise that is so necessarily intrinsic to these aforementioned entities. A definition of PFSs will be provided, with a specific focus on Managerial Consulting organizations as a specific and unique declination of the group. Afterwards, the meaning and the role of Knowledge Development and Sharing within this framework will be explored, with the ultimate goal to fully understand the challenges and outcomes associated to the process. Ultimately, a case study has been analyzed in order to provide an illustrative example of how Learning Management Systems can be applied as essential digital tools to human resources’ training and enrichment when dealing with knowledge management. Keywords: Professional Service Firms, Consulting Firms, Credence Goods, Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Development, Learning Management System, Digitalization