The Retirement Cliff and Its Implications

The “retirement cliff” refers to the impending wave of retirements as a significant portion of the workforce—particularly Baby Boomers—reaches retirement age. According to labor market trends, millions of experienced professionals are set to retire in the coming years, posing a critical challenge for organizations. The departure of seasoned employees risks the loss of institutional knowledge, technical expertise, and key relationships, leading to operational disruptions and costly efforts to regain lost expertise.

One of the most immediate financial consequences Enterprise Knowledge has seen on several of our engagements is the growing reliance on retirees returning as contractors to fill knowledge and capability gaps, often at significantly higher costs than their original salaries. While this can provide a short-term fix, it also creates a long-term liability. Research from Harvard Business Review and other labor market analyses shows that rehiring former employees without structured knowledge transfer can perpetuate a cycle of dependency, inflate workforce costs, and suppress the development of internal talent. Organizations may pay premium contract rates while still losing institutional knowledge over time, especially if critical expertise remains undocumented or siloed. Without proactive strategies, such as structured succession planning, mentoring, and systematic knowledge capture, organizations risk operational disruption, weakened continuity, and increased turnover-related costs that can amount to billions of dollars annually.

The Role of Knowledge Management in Succession Planning

Knowledge management plays a vital role in succession planning by implementing systems and practices that ensure critical expertise is systematically captured and transferred across generations of employees. Documenting key insights, best practices, and institutional knowledge is essential for mitigating the risk of knowledge loss. This process helps to strengthen organizational continuity and ensures that employees have the knowledge they need to perform their roles effectively and make informed decisions.

The Retirement Cliff: Challenges & Solutions

While the table highlights immediate challenges and corresponding solutions, organizations benefit from a deeper set of strategies that address both near-term risks and long-term sustainability. The following sections expand on these themes, outlining actionable approaches that help organizations capture critical knowledge today, while laying the foundation for resilient succession planning tomorrow.

Near-term Strategies: Mitigating Immediate Risk

Engage Employees in Knowledge Capture Efforts

Long-tenured employees approaching retirement have accumulated invaluable institutional knowledge, and their sustained tenure itself demonstrates their consistent value to the organization. When a retirement cliff is looming, organizations should take action to engage those employees in efforts that help to capture and transfer key institutional knowledge before it is lost.

Cast a Wide, Inclusive Net

Organizations often lack visibility into actual retirement timelines. Rather than making assumptions about who might retire or inadvertently pressuring employees to reveal their plans, frame knowledge transfer efforts as part of comprehensive KM practices. By positioning these initiatives as valuable for all long-tenured employees—not just potential retirees—organizations create an inclusive environment that captures critical knowledge. This broader approach not only prepares for potential retirement-related knowledge gaps but also establishes ongoing knowledge transfer as a standard organizational practice.

Acknowledge and Thank Employees

Explicitly acknowledge the expertise and contributions of key knowledge holders participating in efforts. By recognizing their professional legacy and expressing the organization’s desire to preserve and share their wisdom with others, leaders can create a foundation for meaningful participation in knowledge transfer activities. This approach validates key members’ career impact while positioning them as mentors and knowledge stewards for the next generation. Consider setting aside some time from their normal responsibilities to encourage participation.

Reward Knowledge Sharing

Employees are far more likely to engage in knowledge transfer when it is seen as both valuable and valued. In EK’s experience, organizations that successfully foster a culture of knowledge sharing often embed these behaviors into their core talent practices, such as performance evaluations and internal recognition programs. For example, EK has helped to incorporate KM contributions into annual review processes or introduce peer-nominated awards like “Knowledge Champion” to highlight and celebrate individuals who model strong knowledge-sharing behaviors.

Enable Employees to Capture Knowledge

Effective knowledge transfer begins with capturing critical institutional knowledge. This includes both explicit knowledge, such as processes and workflows, and tacit knowledge, such as decision-making frameworks, strategic insights, and the rationale behind past choices. To guide organizations in successful knowledge capture and transfer practices, EK recommends implementing a variety of strategies that help build confidence and make the process manageable.

Provide Documentation Training and Support

Organizations should consider offering dedicated support through roles and teams that naturally align with KM efforts, such as technical documentation, organizational learning and development, or quality assurance. These groups can help introduce employees to the practice and facilitate more effective capture. For example, many organizations focus solely on documenting step-by-step processes, overlooking the tacit knowledge that explains the “why” behind key decisions to provide future employees with critical context. In EK’s experience, preserving and transmitting knowledge of past actions and opinions has given teams the confidence to make more informed decisions and ensure coherence in guidance. This approach is especially valuable from a legal perspective, where understanding the rationale behind decisions is crucial for consistency and compliance.

Help Prioritize the Knowledge to Capture

Organizations can help focus knowledge capture efforts, without overwhelming employees, by prioritizing the types of knowledge to capture. If knowledge falls into one of these categories, it is ideal to prioritize:

1. 1. Mission-Critical Knowledge – High-impact expertise that is not widely known (e.g., decision-making rationales, specialized processes) is at greatest risk for loss. Encourage employees to prioritize this knowledge first.

1. 1. Operational Knowledge – Day-to-day processes that can be captured progressively over time. Suggest to employees that they take advantage of workflows and cycles as they are completed to document knowledge in real time from beginning to end.

1. 1. Contextual Knowledge – Broader insights from specific projects and initiatives are best captured in collective discussions or team reflections from various participants. Aim to make arrangements to put team members in conversation with one another and capture insights.

Embed Knowledge Capture into Workflows

Rather than treating documentation as a separate task, organizations should embed it into the existing processes and workflows where the knowledge is already being used. Integrating documentation creation and review into regular processes helps normalize knowledge capture as a routine part of work. In practice, this may look like employees updating Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) during routine tasks, recording leadership reflections during key decisions, or incorporating “lessons learned” or retrospective activities into project cycles. Additionally, structured after-action reviews and reflective learning exercises can further strengthen this practice by documenting key takeaways from major projects and initiatives. Beyond improving project and knowledge transfer outcomes, these habits also build durable knowledge assets that support AI-readiness.

Design Succession-Focused Knowledge Sharing Programs

Cultural silos and resistance to sharing knowledge often undermine succession planning. Employees may hesitate to share what they know due to fears about losing job security, feeling undervalued, or simply lacking the time to do so. To overcome these challenges, organizations must implement intentional knowledge transfer programs, as outlined below, that aim to prevent a forthcoming retirement cliff from leaving large gaps.

Create Knowledge Transfer Interview Programs

Pairing long-tenured staff with successors ensures that critical institutional knowledge is passed on before key departures. Create thoughtful interview programming that takes the burden off the experienced staff from initiating or handling administrative efforts. EK recently partnered with a global automotive manufacturing company to design and facilitate structured knowledge capture and transfer plans for high-risk roles that were eligible for retirement, including walkthroughs of core responsibilities, stakeholder maps, decision-making criteria, and context around ongoing initiatives. These sessions were tracked and archived, enabling smoother transitions and reducing institutional memory loss. EK also supported a federal agency in implementing a leadership knowledge transfer interview series with retiring senior leaders to capture institutional knowledge and critical insights from their tenure. These conversations focused on navigating the agency’s operations, lessons for successors, and role-specific takeaways. EK distilled these into concise, topical summaries that were tagged for findability and reuse, laying the foundation for a repeatable, agency-wide approach to preserving institutional knowledge.

Foster Communities of Practice

Encourage cross-functional collaboration and socialize knowledge sharing across the organization by establishing communities of practice.  The programs provide opportunities for employees to gather regularly and discuss a common professional interest, to learn from each other through sharing ideas, experiences, and best practices. Involve long-tenured staff in these efforts and encourage them to develop topics around their expertise. EK has seen firsthand how these practices promote ongoing knowledge exchange, helping employees stay connected and informed across departments, even during leadership transitions.

Offer Formal Knowledge Exchange Programs

Knowledge Exchange Programs, like job shadowing, expert-led cohorts, and mentorship initiatives, create clear pathways for employees to share and document expertise before transitions occur. Long-tenured employees are often excellent candidates to take the leading role in these efforts because of the vast knowledge they hold.

Ultimately, effective succession planning is not just about capturing what people know—it is about creating a culture where knowledge transfer is expected, supported, and celebrated. By addressing resistance and embedding knowledge-sharing into the rhythm of daily work, organizations can reduce risk, improve continuity, and build long-term resilience.

Long-term Strategies: Building Sustainable Knowledge Flow

While short-term efforts can help reduce immediate risk, organizations also need long-term strategies that embed knowledge management into daily operations and ensure continuity across future workforce transitions. That is why EK believes Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Knowledge Intelligence (KI) are essential tools in capturing, contextualizing, and preserving knowledge in a way that supports sustainable transitions and continuity.

Below are long-term, technology-enabled strategies that organizations can adopt to complement near-term efforts and future-proof institutional knowledge.

Structure and Contextualize Knowledge with a Semantic Foundation

EK sees contextual understanding as central to KM and succession planning, as adding business context to knowledge helps to illuminate and interpret meaning for users. By breaking down content into dynamic, structured components and enriching it with semantic metadata, organizations can preserve not only the knowledge itself, but also the meaning, rationale, and relationships behind it. EK has supported clients in building semantic layers and structured knowledge models that tag and categorize lessons learned, decisions made, and guidance provided, enabling content to be reused, assembled, and delivered at the point of need. This approach helps ensure continuity through leadership transitions, reduces duplication of effort, and allows institutional knowledge to evolve without losing its foundational context.

Leverage Knowledge Graphs and Intelligent Portals

Traditional knowledge repositories, while well-intentioned, often become static libraries that users struggle to navigate. EK has helped organizations move from these repositories to dynamic knowledge ecosystems by implementing knowledge graphs and a semantic layer. These approaches connect once disparate data, creating relationships between concepts, decisions, and people.

To leverage the power of the knowledge graph and semantic layer, EK has designed and deployed knowledge portals for several clients, providing a means for users to engage with the semantic layer. These portals consolidate information from multiple existing systems into a streamlined, user-friendly landing page. Each portal is designed to serve as a central hub for enterprise knowledge, connecting users to the right information, experts, and insights they need to do their jobs, while also supporting smoother transitions when staff move on or new team members step in. With intuitive navigation and contextualized search, the portal helps staff quickly find complete, relevant answers across multiple systems, explore related content, and access expertise—all within a single experience.

Augment Search and Discovery with Artificial Intelligence

To reduce the friction of finding and applying knowledge, EK has helped clients enhance knowledge portals with AI capabilities, integrating features like context-aware search, intelligent recommendations, and predictive content delivery.  These features anticipate user intent, guide employees to relevant insights, and surface related content that might otherwise be missed. When paired with a strong semantic foundation, these enhancements transform a portal from a basic search tool into an intelligent instrument that supports real-time learning, decision-making, and collaboration across the enterprise.

Automate and Scale Tagging with AI-Assisted Curation

Manual tagging is often cited as one of the more time-consuming and inconsistent aspects of content management. To improve both the speed and quality of metadata, EK has helped clients implement AI-assisted tagging solutions that automatically classify content based on a shared taxonomy.

We recommend a human-in-the-loop model, where AI performs the initial tagging, and subject matter experts validate results to preserve nuance and apply expertise. This approach allows organizations to scale content organization efforts while maintaining accuracy and alignment.

For example, we partnered with a leading development bank to build an AI-powered knowledge platform that processed data from eight enterprise systems. Using a multilingual taxonomy of over 4,000 terms, the platform automatically tagged content and proactively delivered contextual content recommendations across the enterprise. The solution dramatically improved enterprise search, reduced time spent locating information, and earned recognition from leadership as one of the organization’s most impactful knowledge initiatives.

Integrate Technology, People, and Process Within Succession Planning

The most successful organizations do not treat knowledge technologies as standalone tools. Instead, they integrate them into broader KM and succession planning strategies, ensuring these solutions support, rather than replace, human collaboration and expertise.

In EK’s experience, when AI, knowledge graphs, and semantic metadata are used to enhance existing processes—like onboarding, leadership transitions, or project handovers—they become powerful enablers of continuity. These tools help protect institutional knowledge, reduce bottlenecks, and enable repeatable practices for knowledge transfer across roles, teams, and time.

As part of a long-term KM strategy, this allows organizations to evolve from reactive knowledge capture to proactive, ongoing knowledge flow.

Measuring Knowledge Transfer Impact

As we have provided the tools and advice for ensuring impactful knowledge captures and transfers, measuring the effectiveness of knowledge transfer initiatives is the essential next step to ensure that succession planning goals are being met and that knowledge transfer efforts are producing meaningful outcomes. Key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics can help track the success of these initiatives and provide insights into their impact on the organization’s leadership pipeline.

Closing

Navigating the retirement cliff requires both immediate action and long-term planning. By addressing resistance, dismantling silos, embedding knowledge-sharing into daily work, and leveraging technology, organizations can reduce risk, preserve critical expertise, and build long-term resilience. Need help developing a strategy that supports both near-term needs and long-term success? Let’s connect to explore tailored solutions for your organization.

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The Challenge

One of the top global leaders in automotive manufacturing faced significant challenges in managing and accessing critical knowledge across its diverse teams. The company’s employees were working in silos and struggling with fragmented data spread across various departments and business units. Employees relied heavily on personal networks to find information, overburdening subject matter experts and creating bottlenecks during pivotal innovation phases. They consistently spent significant time searching for technical specifications, design documents, and previous project insights. Further, employees did not trust the integrity of the information available to them, limiting their ability to reuse past information efficiently. The company engaged Enterprise Knowledge (EK) to conduct a Knowledge Management (KM) Strategy and solution implementation project plan after the failure of multiple KM initiatives. The engagement’s long-term goal is to establish a shared Knowledge Management System (KMS) to streamline access to crucial information, better leverage experts’ institutional knowledge and experience, and decrease new employees’ time to proficiency.

The Solution

While the company originally sought a single platform to solve all KM challenges, EK’s assessment and collaboration identified a more integrated approach, leveraging existing systems, KM best practices, and semantic foundations. This initial 9-month engagement covered KM organizational design and governance, taxonomy and ontology development, as part of a scalable semantic layer technology architecture, UI/UX design, and a knowledge graph to drive long-term KMS adoption and sustainability. 

Evolving into a multi-year KM transformation, EK focused on creating a strategic and technical framework to drive sustainable KM practices. This phase centered on developing a clear roadmap for KM improvement, designing a KMS proof of concept (PoC), and ensuring the solutions aligned with the company’s evolving needs. The envisioned KMS would serve as a centralized knowledge portal, aggregating multiple applications and platforms to offer a single point of access to a holistic, connected view of the information that employees need to effectively perform their work. The following activities laid the foundation for a fully integrated system and long-term success:

Understanding Business Needs and Requirements
The first phase of the project focused on understanding the company’s business, technical, and functional requirements for the KMS. In a matter of weeks, EK engaged with 100+ select employees (representative of their 24,000-person workforce) and evaluated more than 10 business-critical systems using a hybrid approach that combined top-down (focus groups, interviews, and technical demos) and bottom-up (content and data analysis) research methods.

Insights to Strategy and Roadmap
These inputs informed a comprehensive KM strategy assessment that evaluated the company’s current KM maturity. Combined with inputs from their leadership, EK developed a tailored three-year roadmap for improvement with a focus on three key areas: content governance, user engagement, and knowledge sharing.

Establishing a Sustainable Operating Model
To support long-term sustainability, EK designed a KM operating model that provided a detailed framework to operationalize a KM Center of Excellence (CoE). The KM Org Function & Operating Model included dedicated KM roles and business unit representatives tasked with driving adoption and embedding KM practices across the organization.

Developing the Knowledge Portal PoC
In parallel, EK designed and deployed a Knowledge Portal PoC hosted in the company’s AWS environment. The portal was powered by a knowledge graph and a taxonomy and ontology management solution, consolidating information from multiple systems into a single landing page. The interface was developed using design thinking principles to ensure intuitive navigation and ease of use.

User-Centered Design and Testing
EK facilitated extensive discovery sessions with a variety of stakeholders to define user personas and journey maps. The team tested a clickable prototype and continuously refined the PoC based on stakeholder feedback, ensuring the solution reflected real-world user needs.

Scalable Technical Architecture
To support future growth, EK also provided technical architecture recommendations designed to scale with the company’s data demands. These recommendations were anchored in the semantic layer and security standards to ensure the solution can integrate seamlessly with existing systems, deliver reliable performance, and accommodate advanced AI capabilities over time.

The EK Difference

EK prioritizes iterative, user-driven, sustainable solutions while demonstrating dynamic responsiveness to client needs. Engaging a diverse cross-section of employees, EK leveraged expertise in KM and design thinking to facilitate virtual and onsite sessions, bringing together over 100 employees from various business units efficiently to capture diverse user perspectives. To minimize the level of effort and time from employees, EK employed a variety of validation activities to collect user feedback to refine deliverables and align them with company milestones and leadership briefings. Leveraging an Agile framework, EK held regular reviews, providing visual updates and executive briefings for incremental, efficient processes aligned with strategic goals. 

To promote long-term adoption and cultural change, EK embedded knowledge transfer into every project phase, conducting ongoing working sessions to upskill employees in KM principles, practical system use, and day-to-day maintenance. These sessions were designed to build immediate capability and empower employees to integrate KM practices into how they work moving forward. EK also equipped stakeholders with tailored educational materials and actionable training recommendations to support continuous KM growth. These efforts fostered stronger user ownership and helped lay the foundation for a sustainable, self-sufficient KM culture beyond the project’s completion. 

To meet the complexity of the company’s KM goals, EK assembled a multidisciplinary team capable of bridging business, technical, and functional perspectives. The team included software engineers, KM specialists, taxonomy and ontology experts, and UI/UX designers, each bringing unique expertise to translate complex requirements into actionable components. This cross-functional structure enabled EK to offer integrated recommendations that addressed both technical implementation and non-technical KM strategies. Working across simultaneous workstreams, the team maintained steady progress while ensuring alignment between business needs and system design. As priorities evolved, EK expanded its team to include a dedicated UI/UX design group, focused on crafting an interface tailored to the company’s specific context. The iterative design approach allowed for ongoing refinement, ensuring the KMS fit seamlessly within the company’s environment and supported long-term adoption.

The Results

By the end of the first phase, EK positioned the company to take decisive steps toward long-term KM maturity. The comprehensive three-year KM Strategy Roadmap clarified and prioritized the company’s most pressing KM challenges, offering a phased path forward grounded in its unique business context. The KM Org Function & Operating Model and Governance Plan define the resourcing, roles, and decision-making structures needed to embed KM into the company, ultimately helping leadership identify where to upskill, hire, or realign talent to support KM goals within their current structure.

To accelerate adoption and ensure stakeholder alignment, EK also deployed a Knowledge Portal PoC in the company’s Cloud environment. This allowed staff to experience core portal functionalities, such as integrated project views and intuitive search, and provide input on usability, informing future enhancements. Behind the scenes, EK’s semantic layer framework (taxonomy/ontology and knowledge graph models) laid the groundwork for smarter data connections, improving content findability and relevance in ways that resonate with end users.

The company leadership acknowledged the approach and priority—funding the implementation and next phases of the program and engagement. With the project extended over three years, EK continues to  partner with the company to help transition the PoC into a fully operational production system, providing employees with a reliable “single view of truth.” EK will support onboarding and training for the KM CoE, equipping its members to lead and champion KM efforts company-wide. Additionally, KM best practices and governance will be scaled across the broader organization, strengthening consistency and sustainability.

Looking ahead, EK will introduce advanced KMS capabilities such as natural language processing, AI-powered chatbot support, and personalized content recommendations. These capabilities will transform how employees access and apply knowledge and position the company and its employees for greater agility and innovation as a leader in the automotive industry.

Interested in maturing your organization’s knowledge management? Contact us today!

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Nearly a quarter-century ago, I began my career in Knowledge Management helping organizations to design and implement portals. At the time, portals were one of the first enterprise knowledge management technologies to hit the market, arising as a reaction to digital knowledge sprawl and findability issues in organizations that had embraced digital knowledge and information but were struggling to manage it properly and get it in the hands of the right people.

The first decade of the 2000s saw a massive surge of organizations embracing portals. Companies including Plumtree, BEA, SAP, Vignette, Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM all went to market with their own offerings. I spent that decade honing the People, Process, Content, and Culture elements of implementing portals, with a focus on taxonomies, content governance, content types, and change management, amongst others. Though there were some real successes, for the most part neither the software nor the organizations procuring it were ready to embrace it. In most cases, too much time was spent getting the systems to function properly, with too little effort spent structuring content, enhancing it with metadata, and building in personalized experiences for the appropriate audiences.

By the second decade of the century, portals had largely fallen out of vogue. For many organizations, they became associated with other failed Knowledge Management initiatives, another example of garbage-in, garbage-out types of initiatives that floundered due to poor content quality, governance, findability, and usability. Industry trends moved more toward search solutions to solve findability issues, and Microsoft and other organizations successfully pivoted from portal technologies that indexed content at its source, to more content/document management solutions where content would be loaded directly into the tool (i.e. SharePoint and O365). 

Back at the beginning of the year, in my annual KM Trends Blog, I identified the resurgence of portals in their modern form. The activities of the year have further validated that trend, with many of our clients making new multi-year and multi-million dollar investments in Knowledge Portals. 

What is a Knowledge Portal?

Unlike the failures of the aughts, Knowledge Portals now couple advanced technologies with the significantly more mature Knowledge Management methodologies around human-centered design, content, taxonomy/ontology, and governance, amongst others. Contrasting the definition of portals from their first iteration, today’s Knowledge Portals are not a single technology solution, but rather an integrated suite, typically comprised of a web front-end, content management solution, enterprise search, and knowledge graph (typically with a taxonomy/ontology management tool as well). The basic components of the Knowledge Portal all play an important role in addressing the shortfalls of past portal technologies:

• Web Front-End – Delivers a highly customized, multichannel or omnichannel experience that helps to avoid vendor lock-in while providing maximum usability and delivering the exact type of experience the organization is seeking. For some organizations, this ends up looking like a very simple “Google-type” search page, where for others it brings back the blocked widgets or portlets view (currently embraced by Apple in their mobile OS as well).
• Content Management – Today’s Knowledge Portals, in a way, are a hybrid of where portals began (as gateways to content in their native location), and to where post-portal products evolved (as content/document repositories where content is stored and managed). There is a place for each of these cases in a well-planned Knowledge Portal, and so the content management component of the solution addresses specific content types that should be housed directly within the system.
• Enterprise Search – Search has always been a critical component of KM solutions. In the context of KM Portals, enterprise search drives the findability solution, but also helps to deliver personalized experiences, content recommendations, and navigation such as faceting. Effective enterprise search will deliver an integrated content experience, surfacing content held directly within the Knowledge Portal as well as different content sources throughout the enterprise (and potentially beyond). In today’s KM environment, this means an integration of all forms of content, from structured to unstructured, social to formal, and internal to external.
• Knowledge Graph – One of the driving forces in KM transformations today, the knowledge graph component of the Knowledge Portal powers several key features, including the ability to add context and infer relationships between different content sources and types, powering both improved findability and discoverability of content, as well as creating richer webs of relationships that integrate unstructured content with data. Knowledge Graph technology is the key addition that makes today’s Knowledge Portals so exciting. They can integrate all your knowledge, content, and data in context, delivering enterprise-level views of all of your organization’s knowledge assets. Whereas the content management and search components of a Knowledge Portal have seen significant advancements in their own right, the addition of the Knowledge Graph is the key differentiator that makes this iteration of portals different, and potentially transformative to the way organizations deliver information and do business. Adding the taxonomy/ontology management tool further improved the enhancement of content, largely through auto-tagging of content, as well as improved governance to help eliminate content sprawl.

Taken as a whole, these components, when properly designed, integrated, and implemented, can form a transformational tool for organizations. This year alone, we’ve put into production Knowledge Portals that for the first time ever deliver a fully integrated and contextualized experience for an organization’s employees, partners, or customers, integrating structured and unstructured data in ways that users have not previously experienced. 

These projects hold a number of powerful use cases. For one global financial organization, the new Knowledge Portal we’ve deployed for them integrated unstructured content, structured data, and their people (experts) into a single location where they can see all of the relevant information about their investments, clients, opportunities, and employees. This information used to be scattered across over 12 different systems and now the key decision-making criteria are on one screen. For a large national non-profit, their Knowledge Portal is automatically tagging and integrating key content from over 200 field offices, breaking down silos and implementing enterprise-level content governance for the first time in twenty years. For yet another large corporation, the Knowledge Portal is automatically assembling customized pages of content and data based on user queries, pulling from multiple sources to deliver integrated and contextualized views of the entire enterprise.

Keys to Successful Knowledge Portal Deployments

As with any KM system, any discussion on keys to success needs to begin with understanding for whom you’re building and what problems you’re trying to solve with them. A successful Knowledge Portal initiative will begin with clarity around user types, their business model (including the key entities of the organization), and what they need to find success. Rolled together, this is about designing effective User Personas and Journeys. When executed correctly, this will translate into a clear starting point for design, strategies for system customization, and prioritization of key features and content.

Old school portals used to focus on information architecture and the quality of content. While those areas are still important, these new portals are built around an organization’s Business Model and Knowledge Map. Understanding the business model of an organization and expressing it as an ontology for the graph is key to properly aggregating and displaying the information people need to see. For example, a manufacturing company will have customers, factories, parts, employees, and products. Factories manufacture products using parts that are then sold to customers. Each of these entities needs to be modeled so that each entity has the right information about it and that they are properly related to one another. A factory may have location information, production figures from the data warehouse, and inventory of parts. The graph can then map this business model to the information sources and present that to the portal users. The portal now understands what each information asset is and how they fit together, and serves as a map to the information in its source location. As new systems are adopted, the map just needs to be updated to reflect the new locations. It is important to start small and then grow the model as needed. Getting the proper model (ontology) and defining how the information is captured is critical to ensure that the project shows the right information and is maintainable over time. In the 2000s, the phrase to invoke was “Content is King.” The content is still critical, but in today’s Knowledge Portals, Context is the new King.

A common thread between today’s most successful KM systems is the Consistent Structure of information to ensure it is easy to consume, find, and relate. Through the application of user-centered taxonomies, ontologies, content types, and overall information architecture, Knowledge Portals can present highly disparate sources and types of knowledge, information, and data in context. This means that Knowledge Portals can serve up search results screens and automatically assemble customized pages based on each user’s needs and actions, delivering a true enterprise knowledge view of the organization.

Though Knowledge Portals as described herein offer significant promise, they also present a technical challenge. The full promise they offer is only realized when they are connected to the knowledge, information, and data repositories of the organization in such a way that the appropriate content can be understood, securely accessed, and interacted with in a way that feels easy and intuitive for the end user. To enable this, an Integration Strategy and Implementation is critical to ensure the portal actually delivers integrated and complete content. It is especially important to recognize, again, that the Knowledge Graph component of the portal enables integration of disparate sources and types of data with added context. Defining a clear strategy and priority list of sources and types of content is critical to ensure you’re not just surfacing, but integrating the most valuable content in your organization.

What should quickly become clear is that the successful design and implementation of a Knowledge Portal is not a plug-and-play sort of approach. These efforts are not small, requiring a comprehensive look at content, processes, and technology, with the commensurate long-term investment to ensure the system is built properly and sustained over time. The right approach to this is Agile Operations. Attempting to serve all use cases with all content from all systems as one rollout will fail. Instead, explore the development of an Agile Roadmap that iteratively adds features and content sources over time. This approach will allow you to show value faster, build incremental support to drive adoption, and prove out your approaches and technologies before going too far.

With these approaches and a new understanding of how a Knowledge Portal can impact your business, organizations have a not new, but refreshed tool to help them drive Knowledge Management within their organizations. If you’re ready to explore a KM Transformation driven by a Knowledge Portal, contact us.

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The Solution

Piloting an approach with their IT Support team, EK implemented a Knowledge Management strategy in addition to a taxonomy and an enterprise search strategy aligned with the Bank’s needs and objectives. Using an agile approach, EK:

1. Inventoried information repositories, based on criticality and frequency of use;
2. Assessed and prioritized content by developing indicators to determine content’s value based on user needs and organizational goals, thus eliminating stale, inconsistent, or irrelevant information;
3. Implemented a taxonomy management tool and integrated the system with repositories to tag content, based on an EK-developed taxonomy; and
4. Revamped the search experience by implementing an open-source search engine and designing a new search interface and indexing strategy.

EK trained IT Support Managers, CSRs, and technical staff on how to conduct their roles with the new solutions and further scale their capabilities to benefit other business units in the bank. EK also implemented a KM Leadership team to ensure KM governance processes were in place and that the bank understood the newly developed strategy and how to communicate its value to executive leadership and their staff.

The EK Difference

EK was able to provide end-to-end KM services for the bank with expertise ranging from strategy and design to implementation and maintenance of the proposed solutions. EK utilized a variety of top-down and bottom-up approaches to assess the current inventory of repositories, define a content management strategy based on organizational and user needs, implement a taxonomy management system to properly tag and manage content, and align the system with an EK-designed taxonomy for consistent content management. EK partnered with the bank’s IT team to ensure a transparent and collaborative process, and to ensure that the bank’s staff received the proper and necessary training for effective maintenance of the new solutions. EK further enhanced the process of finding information by implementing a search engine, using in-house expertise, which also aligned with the content management strategy, taxonomy management solution, and the new taxonomy. EK was able to streamline the process of finding information due to the varied expertise in taxonomy design/implementation, content management processes, and enterprise search design and implementation.

The Results

Implementing the Knowledge Management strategy and technical solution resulted in the Federal Bank’s IT Support team being able to more quickly find information at the time of need. Key success outcomes of the engagement include:

• Cost Per Ticket was reduced
• Staff prefer the new search experience over SharePoint Online and DokuWiki
• Employees report increased confidence in search results
• Decreased time spent finding required information
• Increased ability for employees to discover content
• IT Support management understand their roles and responsibilities as they relate to governing the solution and guiding CSRs

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