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Vitals: Nicholas Ashford, 23, Joined in March ‘08

About three weeks into the CDC you are allocated into streams – areas of
the internal work that CDCers do in addition to their external client work. I
was allocated into the Knowledge Management stream and each stream is made of specific focus areas…

One day later and I was offered the opportunity to lead one of the focus
areas: Knowledge Implementation (KI). Deal! I know it's cliché, but the opportunities really are there for the
taking if you want them.

That was the easy part, now I had to start to deliver. Having just
started at Capgemini, just started on the CDC, just started on my project and just starting my first internal role you could be forgiven for thinking that taking on the focus area lead was biting off a little more than I could chew – it almost was.

But that is the thing about Capgemini and the CDC in particular, it that
there’s no shame in asking for support and people are more happy to give it. So after a conversations with my Stream Lead, the previous focus area lead and other who had been in KI and taking onboard some advice, I figured out where I wanted to go and off I went.

So what is Knowledge Implementation and what are we doing? Well
essentially, it’s about sharing Capgemini’s knowledge and expertise with charitable partner organisations (the current incumbent is AIESEC. Currently we are working on three deliverables:

• Creating a workshop on collaboration for AIESEC to present to students
• Doing some consultancy work with AIESEC to ensure their organisation’s knowledge is retained as people pass through and move on
• Searching and selecting an additional charitable organisation for Capgemini to create a long-term partnership with

It’s an excellent opportunity to really give something back to the
community and also to have a free hand over how you want to meet those
objectives and it what timeline you think you can do it in. As a taster, I’m
currently mulling over whether to continue with the potentially infinite
research on potential partners so I don’t miss a gem that is hiding, or whether
to conclude the research and really move things forward. So how do I know when we have done enough research, and how can I prove it? A good little challenge!