On 10 February 2004 I wrote a three-page memo for Asentus Europe, a young joint venture running pan-European technology marketing programmes. It had no strategy in it and no vision statement, just an index: eight business process domains, each with a short list of what belongs inside. I needed a way to file documents, assign responsibilities and see where the company was thin.
Twenty-two years later the same index still structures my work. Every company I have worked for since, whether my own ventures, Adobe, Oracle, Evrythng, Tacton or the clients I advise, has a folder in my archive with the same eight numbered drawers. In March 2026 I adapted the memo, almost word for word, for a hardware start-up. When a simple model survives that long, across that many contexts, it is worth explaining why.
The eight drawers
- Business Process & Performance Management (BPPM): strategy, planning, organisation, quality, brand and the measurement of all of it.
- Finance, Accounting & Purchasing (FAP): ledger, cash, budgets, legal affairs, purchasing and everything an auditor would ask for.
- Knowledge Assets & Research Development (KARD): market and client research, case studies, knowledge products, templates and the things the company knows.
- Human Assets Management (HAM): recruitment, development, reward, culture and internal communication.
- Alliances & Network Management (ANM): partner planning, qualification, development and operations.
- Market & Service Development (MSD): market planning, intelligence, and the portfolio of what we sell.
- Client Management (CM): relationships, qualification, the funnel and client satisfaction.
- Contract Development & Execution (CDE): bids, contracts, projects, delivery and the win/loss review afterwards.
Read it as four groups. BPPM and FAP steer and account. KARD and HAM are the two kinds of capital a knowledge business runs on. ANM, MSD and CM are the go-to-market. CDE is where promises become revenue.
Why it lasted
It describes the work. Departments get renamed and reorganised every few years. The work underneath stays the same: someone still plans, pays, learns, hires, partners, packages, sells and delivers. Because the drawers follow the work, they fit a one-person consultancy and a global enterprise equally well. In a small company one person holds five drawers. In a large one each drawer is a department.
Alliances get their own drawer. This was the least conventional choice in 2004 and has turned out to be the most valuable. Most process models file partners under sales or procurement. In technology markets that is a mistake. Partners have their own lifecycle of planning, qualification, enablement and operations, and their own economics in revenue sharing, co-selling and joint offerings. A separate domain forces the question of who manages the partner ecosystem as a business. In the partner-led businesses I have worked in since, from a Microsoft channel programme reaching tens of thousands of partners to a fabless hardware consortium, ANM was where growth was decided.
Knowledge and people are called assets. “Knowledge assets” and “human assets” sound a little stiff, but the wording was deliberate. A consultancy or software company that does not manage its case studies, templates and expertise as capital will rebuild them for every bid. KARD is the drawer whose value grows over time.
Delivery closes the loop. CDE ends with the win/loss review, which feeds back into KARD and MSD. Without that loop the model is a filing system. With it, the company learns from every deal.
Using it as a diagnostic
Over the years the index has become my first diagnostic when I step into a company. I ask one question per drawer: who owns this, and what is in it? The answers are revealing.
- An empty KARD means every proposal starts from a blank page and every new hire learns by asking around. It shows up as slow bids and inconsistent pricing.
- ANM folded into CM means partners are treated as leads. Their pipeline is invisible, their enablement is ad hoc and revenue-share disputes arrive as surprises.
- A thin MSD next to a busy CM means sales is improvising the offering in every deal. Discounting is usually the symptom.
- A CDE without win/loss reviews means the company repeats its mistakes at the speed of its sales cycle.
- A BPPM that nobody reads means the strategy lives in the founder’s head. That is fine at five people and expensive at fifty.
For a start-up the exercise has a second benefit: it shows which drawers to fill first. A pre-revenue hardware company with a partner-led model does not need a full HAM. It needs a clear ANM, a sharp MSD and enough FAP to survive due diligence. The rest can wait.
A note on archives
Twenty years of my professional life sit in the same eight drawers. When I recently looked for a 2008 partnership manifesto, a 2017 business case and a 2021 white paper, I knew where each one was without searching. They were filed by the work they supported, in the same structure at every employer. Knowledge management advice often starts with tools. I would start with a structure that outlives the tools.
Try it
The index is deliberately simple. It gives a company a shared vocabulary for its own work, so that strategy, filing, responsibilities and diagnosis all use the same eight words. If you lead a growing company, try the one-question-per-drawer exercise with your management team. The empty drawers show you where to start.