KM at Abbott Laboratories

This will be a short entry. Abbott Laboratories are the biggest Chicago-based pharmaceutical company. With all the trouble at Baxter and the departure of Pfizer (Pharmacia / Searle), they are pretty much the only large drug research firm in town.

The only current reference to KM at Abbott is the work of Ashok Katdare, director of Global Project Management. He is speaking on "Identifying Key Performance Metrics and Optimizing Knowledge Transfer" at an IIR conference on technology transfer in February 2004.

Othewise, there seems to be very little official work in knowledge management at Abbott. It is feasible that there are internal projects that never get reported to the business or IT press. Yes, Abbott are buying IT systems for data management, such as the Discovery Bioassay Database, that was an entrant in Bio-IT World's Best Practices awards for 2003.

As always with companies the size of Abbott, there are likely pockets of people who are pursuing knowledge strategy projects because they need them.