The year marked our twelfth consecutive year of growth. This consistency is only possible because we’ve maintained the vast majority of existing clients while winning new clients and accounts. This is a simple formula, but one that has been the hallmark of our steady growth, and with that growth comes the ability to deliver enterprise-level engagements with massive business impact for our clients. A great deal has changed at EK since our inception in 2013 and that first “Year in Review” blog in 2016, but our commitment to our team members, our clients, and the industry as a whole has remained true, as has that simple formula for growth. 

As we now enter 2025, I feel equally enthusiastic and confident about what the year holds. We’ve long been accurately predicting the trends that shape our industry, which has allowed us to maintain our position of leadership and innovation in a highly dynamic set of fields. As we identified the Semantic Layer as the missing link in the AI Revolution, we’ve found ourselves leading and delivering at the intersections of Knowledge Management, Data Management, Information Management, and Information Technology. This translated to exceptional growth and engagement in the past year, resulting in record revenues, backlog of work, and overall headcount as we lead the way into 2025. 

As has now become tradition, I’ll use EK’s six guiding principles to detail the year in review.

People – Our number one asset is our people. We invest in them and ensure they possess the knowledge and resources to serve our clients to the highest degree possible.

I remember back in 2015 we convened the team to help define EK’s guiding principles. At the time we were a team of six, without an office of our own, so a client graciously lent a conference room for us to work in. The first principle we defined was the above – our commitment to our People, and our commitment to investing in them. I’ve always said that my most important responsibility at EK is to ensure every team member feels honored, supported, and set up to grow at EK. Our high retention and even higher levels of quality and performance are a testament to that.

We maintained and expanded all of the elements of our benefits programs, EK Balance, and EK Grow, all dedicated to delivering the triad of learning, engagement, and collaboration to our team members. This included our continued learning benefit of a guaranteed $3,000 per year per employee for external training and conferences, our year-long onboarding program called Kamp EK (to which we added new modules for Project Managers and People Managers), our Lifelong Learning benefit of $1,000 per year for non-work related development, Pitches and Pints (where EK leadership coaches employees on public speaking over dinner), and EK’s Learning Cohorts, where EK leadership and subject matter experts teach new joiners EK’s core approaches and methodologies to quickly upskill them. I am commonly asked which traits I value most in new employees, and a passion for learning is always one of my answers. We’ve now established a suite of ways to reward and foster that passion.

In the office, we hosted yoga classes, massage days, breakfasts served by EK leadership, make-your-own-sundae bars, wine tastings, and other events dedicated to foster collaboration and build community amongst our rapidly growing team. At the same time, we recognized that much of our twenty percent growth in headcount came through our nationwide recruiting, hiring fully remote employees outside our headquarters area. To support the coast-to-coast community-building of our team, we flew everyone to headquarters three times over the course of the year for our traditional events of the annual Gala, Purple Elephant, and Pirate Ship Cruise. 

We took advantage of each of these all-company gatherings to get to know each other better and celebrate, but also to conduct project-based working sessions and plan future EK initiatives in order to better deliver for our clients and better support and reward our employees. Preceding the recent Purple Elephant, our December holiday party, I asked the company to envision what EK would look like in 2027, and EK’s leadership team will take those visions into our planning for the years to come in order to deliver for the company, finding new ways to help the team continue to grow.

Thought Leadership – We serve as leaders in the industry, sharing our knowledge and expertise, guiding the development of knowledge, data, and information practices, and supporting the community.

Last year I celebrated a major milestone with our knowledge base: the publication of our 500th article. This year we blew past that, and now have over 600 blogs, white papers, case studies, slide presentations, videos, and podcast episodes in our knowledge base. I believe this makes us the largest single repository of Knowledge Management resources that are free and open to the public. On top of our knowledge base, our book, Making Knowledge Management Clickable, continued to receive attention and platitudes, and our podcast, “Knowledge Cast,” maintained its place as a top podcast in the field. 

Over the course of the year, we drove the conversation in the industry, identifying new trends and providing detailed discussions, articles, and presentations with a focus on concrete business value and outcomes. We spoke at over twenty different conferences and events, notably keynoting both the Henry Stewart Semantic Data Conference (twice), as well as the inaugural Knowledge Summit Dublin event. At KMWorld, we once again had over a dozen different EK team members present. More importantly, overall we had nearly forty different team members speak at over twenty different conferences around the world. This is particularly notable to me as it demonstrates EK’s depth of thought leadership. We’re not just one or two big names in the industry – we are a deep pool of industry professionals and thought leaders helping to shape the future of the field more and more each year.

Also of particular note, we produced our own thought leadership event in Europe this past year. Recognizing a gap in industry discourse, we convened the Semantic Layer Symposium in Munich, Germany. The event brought together a select group of thought leaders and practitioners in the field of Knowledge Management, Data Management, Information Management, Artificial Intelligence, and the field of Semantics for a sales-free day of learning and discussion. Stay tuned for an upcoming announcement about 2025’s event.

All of our work again helped us to be recognized by the industry. Again this year, KMWorld and Info Today recognized EK as one of the 100 Companies That Matter in KM, as well as one of the AI 100: The Companies Empowering Intelligent Knowledge Management. Though I am always proud of the recognition, what matters a great deal more is how I see the industry as a whole, following our words and actions. This has allowed us to continue to attract the greatest talent in the field, while simultaneously spurring us to innovate further. As the industry leaders, our job isn’t just to suggest what’s next, it’s to deliver what’s next, and that is what we’ve been doing year after year.

Transparency – We communicate clearly and openly, ensuring the highest level of quality and accountability for our company’s management, in our service to our clients, and with respect to our colleagues.

As I’ve shared in the past, we endeavor to run EK as openly as possible, sharing company goals, misses, challenges, and mistakes with the team throughout the year. We hold twice monthly all-company knowledge shares with the team to do just that, and it has created a culture of openness, which it is my job to foster. During each year’s all-hands meetings, I have introduced a list of both challenges and accomplishments. Looking back, I’m proud to see how many of the previous year’s listed challenges become accomplishments in the following year, as we’ve rallied as a company to face these challenges directly and take concrete action.

Moreover, during these all-hands meetings, I also establish our goals for growth in the year to come. In a year where many services companies struggled, and where our space encountered greater competition, I was particularly proud to share with the team that we beat all of our growth and performance targets for the year.

This year, we officially established EK’s Project Management arm under a new Director in order to better measure EK’s performance, ensure quality on the larger and larger enterprise engagements with which we’re being trusted by our clients, and develop new project managers and project management standards to keep pace with the highly technical and complex nature of our work.

Recognizing the increasingly hybrid nature and growing size of our project teams, we also established a new project excellence tradition dedicated to building team identity and collaboration. Starting this year, we defined a standard of bringing all enterprise project teams together in the early stages of a new project to ensure the team understands their roles, is poised to be successful, and is dedicated to serving their client’s needs. This is done at EK’s expense, not the client’s, again, with a focus on quality, performance, and collaboration.

Though we’ve embraced remote and hybrid work in a post-Covid world, we’ve also found greater community at our headquarters, as more and more team members choose to spend more time in the office. Bucking the industry trend, we’re taking on more office space and building it out to suit a hybrid workforce, while still creating a range of spaces for in-person collaboration and celebration. This was partly made necessary by the fact that we brought in our largest class of new college and university hires ever and will continue that in 2025. Our investment in individuals at the beginning of their careers continues to reap dividends, infusing EK with new ideas and energy, and is another facet of our commitment to the community and the industry.

Partnership – We partner with our clients, building meaningful relationships founded on a sustained commitment to mutual success.

With our clients, our industry, and our community, we’ve continued our commitment to partnership and impact. I’ve already shared in the previous sections the greatest outcome of our spirit of partnership with our clients. They choose to remain with us year after year, returning to seek our help, re-engaging on new initiatives, and seeking our guidance on their latest challenges. We’ve cheered on clients as they’ve been promoted or taken on new opportunities, and it is the greatest compliment we could ask for that even when they move organizations, they choose to bring EK along with them.

As our clients have consistently placed trust in us and treated us as partners, we’ve also sought ways to partner with the community of which we’re a part. This past year, EK sponsored over a dozen different conferences. I was particularly proud to have EK sign up as the first sponsor for the new Knowledge Summit in Dublin, once again showcasing our willingness to put money back into the industry and help fill gaps.

We also engaged with our community philanthropically. Notably, we continued our long-standing support for the Wolf Trap Institute for Early Learning Through the Arts, helping to ensure that kids in our area will have access to arts and music education. Through our annual Know Shave Knowvember, we had our own employees choose the causes that matter most to them, making donations to a broad array of local, national, and global organizations selected by our team members. With our paid volunteer time benefit, still other teams at EK were free to volunteer their time, supporting, amongst others, some of the DC area’s soup kitchens. This is a great example of something that’s good for EK, good for our team members, and good for the community. In 2025, we’ll continue to seek opportunities for partnership at all of these levels.

Integration – We provide our customers with the full range of EK’s expertise, integrating all of our services and resources to ensure the most significant business value.

The guiding principle of integration has continued to take on greater meaning for us and our clients, in a way becoming a description of what EK delivers, not just what we do. We founded EK with the goal of being the world’s largest and most recognized provider of Knowledge Management services. We’ve achieved that, and have also become much more by fulfilling every organization’s goal of integrating their knowledge assets, regardless of type, location, form, or repository. This is the merging of Knowledge Management, Data Management, Information Management, and Content Management via the Semantic Layer and Artificial Intelligence. It is where we lead, where we’re seeing the greatest growth, and where we’re making the most impact for our clients.

One of the great outcomes of this integration of services is growth not just for EK as a whole, but for our average project size, which grew a whopping forty percent over the last year. With this growth has come greater project complexity, which we’ve risen to address via the new Project Management Office, new standards, and new positions. We’ve relied on EK’s consistent culture of community and kindness, asking thought leaders in each of these disparate fields to come together and learn from each other. I don’t believe we would have been successful scaling as gracefully as we’ve done without the foundation of our culture to drive that collaboration. As a result, we’ve smashed together disparate fields to create something new, and far more valuable than its collective parts.

Overall, this new approach to integrated services and delivery of organization-shifting solutions has resulted in greater maturity for us, as we’ve rapidly grown from startup, to scaleup, to a fully realized and enterprise-ready organization in just a decade, and are now helping a retinue of the world’s largest and most recognizable brands to transform their organizations.

Energy – We share our enthusiasm with our clients and colleagues, leveraging our excitement to achieve meaningful change.

With consistent, yet extraordinary growth, new, larger projects, and new ways to deliver for the enterprise, I am carrying a great deal of energy and excitement into the year. More importantly, I’m seeing this same energy and excitement mirrored by individuals at all levels of EK in a way that feels fresh, and actually reminiscent of our early days as a startup. We have more exciting announcements to share as the year comes into focus, so keep following along as we set the conversation, deliver for the enterprise, and integrate everything we have, for everything you need.

On behalf of Enterprise Knowledge, Happy New Year and best wishes for 2025!

The post EK’s Year in Review – 2024 appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

The Solution

To help standardize descriptive metadata in the document repository systems, EK partnered with the Knowledge Management and Knowledge Apps team to tackle four key initiatives: 

1. Integrate the Taxonomy & Ontology Management System (TOMS) with one of the primary document management systems at the organization to serve as the Semantic Layer representing contextual and descriptive knowledge models; 
2. Extend the TOMS to integrate with existing gold sources (sources of truth) for models; and
3. Develop a solution to support automatic application of metadata to documents and streamline the document deposit process (auto-classification).

To begin working towards the first two goals, the research center and EK teams worked as one to develop use cases and prioritize the metadata fields for integration. The integration use case focused on integrating the Subject and Author fields of technical research documents, two fields that were key for improving the searchability of content within the document management system. Additionally, the team also identified gold source models, which are existing models for key metadata fields such as People (authors) and Facilities at the organization. 

After defining and documenting the use case, business requirements, and technical requirements, the EK team partnered with the organization’s development team to build an API that would integrate the TOMS with the document management system and allow the TOMS to replicate existing gold source models. The resulting API’s functionality is twofold: 

1. It serves as an API abstraction to enable seamless integration, allowing data to flow smoothly between the TOMS and the document management system. This enables the document management system to consume standard metadata, while also enabling document depositors to submit new concepts to the TOMS model for approvers to review. 
2. It supports ETL functionality to ensure that data remains synchronized between the internal systems and the TOMS. This “gold source replication” ensures that metadata is perpetually updated and connected across systems and is extensible to additional gold source models.

For the third initiative, streamlining the document deposit process and standardizing descriptive metadata in the document repository systems, EK architected and developed an auto-classification proof of concept (POC) which built on existing systems in the organization’s environment. Built over 6 weeks, this POC took a subset of reports and leveraged an LLM and the TOMS to run auto-classification and produce a list of recommended subjects for each document. These recommended subjects provided the document depositors with a shortened list of subjects to choose from and ensured that the subjects adhered to a standardized model stored in the TOMS (e.g., the list of subjects was a controlled list/taxonomy). Finally, the EK team documented the auto-classification lifecycle and provided technical documentation for the API so the organization’s development team could continue building on and enhancing auto-classification and integration capabilities. 

The EK Difference

EK’s extensive experience in semantic solutions, data engineering, semantic search, and content management enabled the team to deliver the API integration and gold source replication ahead of schedule and under budget. The EK team provided comprehensive code repository documentation to the organization’s development team. Additionally, the EK team ensured there was continuous knowledge sharing between the EK and organization development teams, enabling the team to continue expanding work after the engagement. The EK team also brought expertise in strategic planning and management and used this expertise to improve the team structure and project tracking during the engagement. 

Finally, because the work was completed ahead of schedule, the EK team went above and beyond to guide the Knowledge Management Team in optimizing the solution through augmentation with a custom search front-end. The EK team facilitated several requirements-gathering sessions and developed initial wireframes to drive alignment and validation of use cases for search capabilities. These strategic documents can help drive business-buy in as the client team continues building on the metadata standardization work.

The Results

As a result of their engagement with EK, the research and development center has successfully integrated 3 models with their primary document repository, enabling 4 key metadata fields to pull from a standard set of values. This integration ensures that the 100,000+ documents in the document management system are using a consistent and correct set of metadata fields and values. The 4000+ users of the document management system can now better find and understand historical research documents, thereby increasing operational efficiency for new research efforts.

Furthermore, the organization will be able to continue to leverage the API to integrate the TOMS models to additional systems, enabling standardization of descriptive metadata across repositories and reducing manual effort and data anomalies. Additionally, the API enhancement allows document depositors to contribute to the accuracy and currency of the OMS models that support the metadata fields.

Finally, the auto-classification proof of concept and use definition for a search front-end empowers the organization’s Knowledge Management team to advocate for future capabilities and initiatives within the Division. This comprehensive effort establishes the groundwork for the organization to improve the search and findability of documents and pursue additional data transformation capabilities.

 

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The post Optimizing Historical Knowledge Retrieval: Standardizing Metadata for Enhanced Research Access appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Our ability to deliver for our clients has never been stronger, with an enviable collection of global subject matter experts having joined the organization and new investments in internal training and development bearing fruit, we’re successfully delivering on some of the largest and most complex KM transformations, learning and content development initiatives, and knowledge graph and enterprise AI programs in the world. As other organizations are scrambling to jump on the artificial intelligence bandwagon, we’ve literally written the book on the confluence of knowledge, data, information, and technology as the foundation for enterprise AI, relying on our years of successful projects in the space to deliver enterprise-level solutions for our clients.

As I’ve done each year since starting this annual entry, I’ll use EK’s six guiding principles to further discuss the year in review.

People – Our number one asset is our people. We invest in them and ensure they possess the knowledge and resources to serve our clients to the highest degree possible.

There is a very clear and specific reason that our first guiding principle is People. We are where we are because of our team, their expertise, their unique personalities, and the relationships they’ve forged with each other and our clients. Of course we have a slew of methodologies, benchmarks, and other proprietary materials we rely on to deliver, but at the end of the day (and the year, in this case), we rise because of our team. Ensuring the team is set up for success, feels valued, and chooses to grow with EK is my most important responsibility as CEO. 

In years past, I’ve talked about many of the elements we’ve put in place to support our team. We’ve maintained and expanded all of the unique elements I’ve discussed in the past. Our continued learning benefit of $3,000 per year per employee was used at a higher rate than ever before, we added new modules and metrics to our year-long onboarding program called Kamp EK, and our Lifelong Learning benefit of $1,000 per year for non-work related development was used for some very cool new purposes including yoga, building a drone from scratch, landscape architecture, horseback riding, wine tasting, guitar lessons, and figure skating. The very best employees are those with a passion for learning, and EK’s support for that is an important and actionable way we demonstrate how we value our team and their unique interests.

In the office, we hosted yoga classes, massage days, pop-up juice parties, liquid nitrogen ice cream, wine tastings, and cocktail/mocktail making competitions. We also ran a few friendly competitions, ranging from a group-based steps challenge, a basil growing competition, a hydration challenge, and Know Shave Knowvember, all of which we translated to charitable giving from EK to a small collection of philanthropic partners. In total, we made nearly $30,000 of donations, yielding a real impact for our chosen organizations.

One notable addition to our cadre of programs this year was the creation of our Learning Cohorts. We recognized that our growth, coupled with the very unique expertise we possess, created a wonderful opportunity to further invest in the skills development of our team members. We already run a myriad of structured, more formal learning around a broad array of soft and hard skills, but we chose to supplement that with a less structured, more social learning opportunity. I first ran an eight-month long Learning Cohort on all things KM Strategy, Design, and Implementation. Meeting weekly, we actually used Making Knowledge Management Clickable as the loose teaching guide, covering a chapter per week, which I think was made more palatable when supplemented by the bottle of a good Napa Cabernet Sauvignon I brought each week. Leading that cohort was one of my favorite recent experiences, and it inspired additional Learning Cohorts led by others at EK on the topics of Project Management, Solution Architecture, and Ontology Design. The informal style of these sessions is a great match for our culture, and they’re a great way we’re modeling good KM behaviors and techniques of knowledge transfer and sharing as well.

As a result of these programs and our strong foundation and culture, EK was recognized by Inc. Magazine as one of the best workplaces in the United States for a fifth time! Below, I’ll share more about our national and global recognition, new wins, and other successes, but this win is always particularly meaningful to me as it is based on an anonymous survey of our employees, mirroring that the hard work we all put into making EK a great place to work, and for our people to thrive, continues to pay dividends.

Thought Leadership – We serve as leaders in the industry, sharing our knowledge and expertise, guiding the development of Agile knowledge and information practices, and supporting the community.

We hit a major milestone with our knowledge base this year, publishing our 500th article over the summer. The knowledge base includes a wide range of blogs, white papers, case studies, slide presentations, videos, and podcast episodes, all of which are free and open on our website. Collectively, they represent one of the deepest repositories of knowledge in our field. Our podcast, Knowledge Cast, was named the number one KM podcast for the third year in a row. At KMWorld, we tied last year’s record, delivering twelve separate presentations, including case studies alongside our clients at ASML, Ulteig, and Intel. On top of our longstanding presence at KMWorld, over twenty EK employees spoke at over a dozen different conferences across the fields of KM, Learning, Content, and Data this year. That was yet another record for us and a particularly notable one as it demonstrates the breadth of our talent.

Our knowledge base, conference speaking, podcast, book, and bevy of experts all helped to secure new recognition from the industry. Again this year, KMWorld and Info Today recognized EK as one of the 100 Companies That Matter in KM for the ninth year in a row, as well as one of the AI 100: The Companies Empowering Intelligent Knowledge Management for the fourth year in a row. 

I’ve said for many years, I firmly believe that we are developing the next generation of leaders in the field(s). Though I always hope our people will choose to stay at EK forever, I’ve also been really proud to see that those who do choose to leave are consistently being hired for their next dream career positions, often going to very senior government posts, in-house to lead or build a department, or even to start their own company. It is always a bit melancholy to see an EK’er transition to alumni status, but seeing the amazing next opportunities we’re generating softens that blow. Our success in attracting new talent at all levels, including new established thought leaders and published authors, has also been an exciting counterbalance you’ll hear more about in the year to come.

Transparency – We communicate clearly and openly, ensuring the highest level of quality and accountability for our company’s management, in our service to our clients, and with respect to our colleagues.

Our commitment has always been to run EK as an open book, sharing company goals and performance with all employees at every level. That means sometimes we’re delivering bad news when we miss a target or hit a snag, but in those cases we’re doing it together and also collectively working to address the challenges and learn from them. 

This past year we commenced a multi-stage reorganization to better accommodate our growth and successfully serve our clients. We call this EK 2.0, clearly a misnomer as we’ve gone through a myriad of changes in our nearly eleven years in business, but it felt right, given some of the major efforts and enhancements we planned and executed (and EK 14.0 just doesn’t have the same ring). One of my favorite days of the year was convening the entire company to discuss the reasons for the reorganization, explain all the moves, discuss the value of each component, and address any concerns collectively. We haven’t completed EK 2.0 by a fair stretch, but I am really proud of how the organization has helped us change and grow together as part of this.

As we’ve successfully moved to a remote-hybrid setup post-Covid, we’ve also updated our standard knowledge sharing and communications tools and practices. We’ve continued our bi-monthly all-hands employee knowledge share, where we discuss company goals and achievements, new wins, greet all new hires, and have employees present on new learnings or innovations, and added smaller breakouts and coaching sessions to check in on projects, staffing, and leadership, ensuring we’re arming our employees with the ability to lead and have a strong voice in the organization. Along with the cohorts, the one-on-one coaching I’ve picked up with some team members has become some of my favorite hours of each week.

We’ve also built upon our in-person traditions, coming together at key moments of the year for our Annual Winter Gala, Summer Pirate Ship Cruise, and Holiday Purple Elephant. This last year the Gala was particularly special, as we rang in June 11, 2023, the official 10-year anniversary of EK’s foundation at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, decked out in our finest. We preceded these in-person ceremonies with in-person strategic planning sessions, live training, and other opportunities to celebrate our collective successes.

Partnership – We partner with our clients, building meaningful relationships founded on a sustained commitment to mutual success.

The word “Partnership” was chosen very carefully when we first crafted our guiding principles in 2013. It expresses our vision to be true consultative partners and trusted advisors to our clients, rather than generic order takers. Though we’ve grown to deliver enterprise-level initiatives and offer the complete lifecycle of knowledge, information, and data management services from strategy, to design, through implementation and operations, that commitment to real partnership has remained a constant for us.

Many of you might have seen the messaging we put out in the fall to signal a major recruiting effort. The need for this recruiting push was driven by our successful partnerships, with EK’s marquis clients choosing to not just continue their work with us into 2024, but selecting us as their chosen trusted partner, asking us to do more with them, and committing to larger and more impactful engagements that reach the highest levels of the organizations. Moving beyond the financials, 2023 was another year where many of our clients chose to co-present with us at conferences, and still others, like the European Central Bank and Green Climate Fund chose to recognize our work online and unprompted, again demonstrating that they view us as true and longstanding partners in the same way we do towards them.

Our successes in building these long-term partnerships mean that we’re able to support the professional community in new and exciting ways. This past year we joined the EDM Council, a global data management association, in order to exchange and contribute to trusted and shared data management frameworks and industry standards to shape the future of data and analytics. In addition, we sponsored a number of conferences including KMWorld and the Midwest KM Symposium. In 2024, we’re sponsoring the launch of a new conference in Europe, Knowledge Summit Dublin, which I’m particularly excited to participate in and speak at. 

These successes also mean an impact on the greater community. I already detailed our philanthropic contributions this year, but I wanted to note in particular the fact that we crossed the threshold of $100,000 contributed over EK’s history to the Wolf Trap Institute for Early Learning Through the Arts. It is exciting to think that because of the work we do with our great clients, a lot of kids in this world have gained access to arts and music education they otherwise would have lacked. 

Integration – We provide our customers with the full range of EK’s expertise, integrating all of our services and resources to ensure the most significant business value.

Back in 2013, we chose the concept of Integration largely to express the coming together of our different areas of expertise. Over the years, we’ve assembled an incredible team of experts with backgrounds in Knowledge Management Strategy, Knowledge Transfer, Data Management and Governance, Information Management, Content Strategy and Assemble, Learning, Taxonomy and Ontology, Knowledge Graphs…the list goes on and on. This alone is unique, but more than just bringing these experts together under a single roof, we’ve fostered a community of collaboration and kindness where they’re working together, learning from each other, and blazing new trails in their individual fields based on the ideas and learnings from their colleagues. 

As EK has grown, and of particular note in 2013, an additional meaning of integration has come into focus for us. When I consider the common thread between all of our services, it is this idea of integrating information to eliminate silos across an organization. All of our services, all of our people, and all of our projects are, at their core, about integration and connections. We’re using semantic layers to integrate different types of data, information, and knowledge across the enterprise, adding context, and ensuring that collective material is more actionable and easier to find. We’re connecting people and the knowledge they hold so that it may be retained by the organization and leveraged more effectively for collaboration, innovation, and learning. Increasingly, we’re integrating all of an organization’s knowledge assets and enhancing them with context and meaning in order to drive an organization’s AI initiatives. This is what we’ve always done, it’s always been a part of our mission, but that common thread is clearer than it’s ever been.

To feed this continued integration of our services and leadership in the combined fields driving AI, we organized all of our Knowledge, Information, and Data Management services under a single sector. We’ve always held that considering all of an organization’s knowledge assets collectively hold the greatest value for the organization, but increasingly, that is also translating to delivering solutions that bridge these gaps. Though the move would’ve been met with skepticism even five years ago, it is a natural progression of how we’ve been operating and expresses the manner in which we’ve always approached Knowledge Management: as the complete continuum of knowledge assets.

Energy – We share our enthusiasm with our clients and colleagues, leveraging our excitement to achieve meaningful change.

In the midst of a burst of growth, new clients, and new team members, and having just closed out our tenth year of sustained growth, I don’t think I’ve ever been more enthusiastic about the year in front of me. The energy we bring to our clients and colleagues is what drives me to do more at EK and ask, “What’s next?” with excitement and enthusiasm.

On behalf of Enterprise Knowledge and the EK Group, I thank you for your partnership and wish you a wonderful 2024!

The post EK’s Year in Review – 2023 appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

In this Part I, I walk through sections about anticipating and reacting to change within an organization, the common dilemma of consolidating or integrating technical solutions, and the significance of prioritizing business value during strategy and design initiatives. In Part II, I will address the advantages of building to scale for technical and non-technical solutions, the benefits of engaging a diverse audience, and the importance of educating stakeholders on how to maintain solutions in the long-term. By reading this blog series you will obtain valuable best practices, real-life applications, and comprehensive solutions to common organizational challenges at large enterprises, providing you with a better understanding of how to assess the current state and maturity of your organization, and potentially even a valuable starting point for solving an existing problem that you’re experiencing.

1. Anticipate Change

Prolonged success at any large organization can be dependent on its ability to manage change. Large organizations are often in flux, and rapidly changing environments require rapidly evolving products and processes. It is key to consistently evaluate and re-evaluate your enterprise processes and organizational structure to ensure they are fulfilling the requirements of your organization and enabling employees to effectively execute their job responsibilities.

Business agility, or lack thereof, for large organizations can appear in many different forms. I recently worked with an organization that underwent a series of mergers and acquisitions, and as a result, their organizational landscape was highly siloed and fragmented. The organization was financially integrated under one name, but from a logistical and operational standpoint, business units and teams were not communicating or sharing critical information with one another. As a result, many of the same or similar processes were being executed in various locations across the enterprise without leveraging each other, and it was also very difficult to find a piece of content located in another repository. This duplication of workflows and content, as well as the lack of synergy between adjacent business units and teams, was costing the organization time and resources that could have been allocated more effectively, ultimately resulting in increased bottom-line costs.

One solution that EK recommended for this organization to combat these issues was the implementation of a KM Leadership structure to establish dedicated KM team members to initiate and guide a KM program, promoting cross-functional relationships throughout the enterprise and encouraging knowledge and information transfer. To complement the KM Leadership structure, EK also recommended a KM Governance model to mitigate risks and bad habits such as recreating pre-existing documentation or artifacts, storing content in the wrong location or tagging it incorrectly, utilizing an inaccurate or outdated piece of content, wasting hours searching for a piece of content that someone may or may not have access to, failing to update or archive obsolete content, or utilizing informal networks to access experts or colleagues.

2. Consolidate or Integrate

Maintaining too many disjointed systems can present challenges from a logistical perspective, creating confusion for users on where to store and find content, as well as how to share things across platforms. It is very common for large organizations to have an array of systems, repositories, and tools that comprise their technical stack, many of which overlap in function and purpose. It is also not uncommon for these systems to be disparate, meaning that systems cannot effectively “speak” to one another through integrations or channels. If systems are disjointed, and an organization does not possess a universal search tool that’s integrated with the necessary systems and tools, employees must often navigate through each individual repository when trying to locate a piece of content or even ask a colleague to find it for them. 

An initial knee-jerk reaction may be to consolidate repetitive systems and migrate all relevant content to a single platform in order to mitigate confusion and ultimately lower overhead and subscription costs. While system consolidation is a viable solution in some use cases, it is equally important to understand that large organizations typically consist of many different employee types, teams, and business units, all of which can use different tools based on personal preferences and workflows. While this can be logistically challenging, organizations need to be extremely careful not to consolidate or remove systems that are integral to certain workflows, particularly ones inherent to creative processes that have propelled the organization to innovate and be successful within its given space. Just because an organization possesses multiple different systems that have certain core functionalities and applications in common, does not necessarily mean that these systems should all be consolidated into one. 

Good KM can prevent this. A common best practice during the initiation of any technical evaluation is to engage with stakeholders from across the organization to understand their workflow priorities before removing any tools. Furthermore, one possible alternative to any sort of system consolidation is an enterprise taxonomy, or in other words, a controlled vocabulary used to describe or characterize explicit concepts of information for the purposes of capturing and managing content at an organizational level. Designing and implementing an enterprise taxonomy into prioritized repositories to universally tag content, utilized in tandem with a taxonomy management tool and an enterprise search tool, can help organizations realize and overcome their inefficiencies without having to make any major system changes or disrupt workflows.  

A good example of this came during an engagement with a multinational technology firm, where one team used SharePoint as their knowledge base, and another team used an internally developed software to house their day-to-day information and content. As each team was only familiar with and had the necessary permissions to its own respective system, it was challenging to navigate another repository when working together on adjacent initiatives. The organization did not want to consolidate either system as there were viable use cases for both, and removing one would have disrupted workflows even more. Knowing this, EK proposed that the organization design and implement an enterprise taxonomy that could be integrated into the existing enterprise search tool and the prioritized repositories. This enabled employees to universally search and pull content across disparate systems, empowering them to find and leverage information significantly quicker and easier than before, enhancing both employee satisfaction and productivity. 

3. Prioritize Business Value

KM success at large organizations is often defined by what tangible Return on Investment (ROI) is attained as a result of a given effort. It can be difficult to garner buy-in for KM without quantifiable metrics to support it, and when acting on a limited budget, prioritizing processes or systems that are directly tied to business outcomes and/or end-users can be a key component in the success of a given initiative. During any KM engagement, it’s important to understand and prioritize the sections of the organization that require the most immediate attention and will translate into clear, palpable ROI. 

Furthermore, successful engagements that demonstrate immediate business value to an organization and its end-users can also be helpful in garnering institutional buy-in for KM. Being able to tangibly demonstrate how a KM initiative solved an existing problem, and in turn, definitively improved a business process or output, shows the concrete value of KM and incentivizes more comprehensive support for KM from across the organization. 

During one recent engagement, another large technology firm was struggling with the findability, discoverability, accuracy, and relevancy of its content, and it was also seeking to lay a foundation for the future of remote work. The organization was composed of numerous different teams and business units, many of which struggled to find the data and information they needed to execute their day-to-day workflows. While the organization wanted to solve this problem at an enterprise level, they needed to prioritize sections of the organization that would provide the most immediate business value because they did not yet have the resources to address the problem enterprise-wide. EK worked with the organization in selecting which business units and/or teams could enable “quick-wins” and prioritized them when making recommendations. EK provided recommendations to the organization on three primary areas: Enterprise Search, Content Strategy, and KM Leadership and Governance. These recommendations were focused on the areas of the organization that had been mutually identified as those which will provide the most immediate value, but also provided scaling models for how to most effectively expand the solutions to the rest of the enterprise. The organization was so satisfied with our work that they re-engaged EK to begin executing the recommendations in 2023. 

Conclusion

Whether you’re anticipating a major organizational change on the horizon, or planning on implementing a new strategy or solution to your environment to solve an existing problem, KM transformations can be complex and difficult to manage. If these challenges sound applicable to you or your organization, EK’s expert consultants, designers, architects, and engineers are available to assist your organization with any and all of its organizational needs. 

Stay tuned for Part II where I will walk through the advantages of building to scale for technical and non-technical solutions, the benefits of engaging a diverse audience, and the importance of educating stakeholders on how to maintain solutions in the long-term.

The post Applied Knowledge Management Series: Addressing Challenges at Large Enterprises, Part 1 appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Knowledge graphs are commonly paired with enterprise search to meet these expectations, enabling users to explore connections between information and extend search results with contextual data. To help get started enhancing your search results with a knowledge graph, we put together the following five-step process that adheres to search, knowledge graph, and search design best practices.

For a deeper dive into each of the five steps, check out my corresponding white paper on the topic. EK has expertise in enterprise search, ontology design, and knowledge graph implementations, and we would love to work with you on your next search journey. Please feel free to contact us for more information.

The post 5 Steps to Enhance Search with a Knowledge Graph appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

In our experience at Enterprise Knowledge (EK), we consider the following to be core and essential systems for most integrated KM technology solutions:

• Content Management Systems
• Taxonomy Management Systems
• Enterprise Search Tools
• Knowledge Graphs

The systems mentioned above are essential tools to enable successful and mature KM, and when integrated with one another can serve to revolutionize the interaction between an organization’s staff and its information. EK has seen the most success with client organizations once they have understood the need for a blended set of technological tools and taken the steps to implement and integrate them with one another.

Once this need for a combined set of specialized solutions is realized, the issue of how to implement these solutions becomes ever-present and must be approached with a specific strategy for design and deployment. This blog will help to outline some of the key tips and guidelines for the implementation of a KM technology solution, regardless of its current state.

Prioritizing Your Technology Needs

When thinking about the approach to implementing an organization’s identified technology solutions, there is often an inclination to prioritize solutions that are considered “state-of-the-art” or “cooler” than others. This is understandable, especially with the new-age technology that is on the market and able to create a “wow” factor for a business’ employees and customers. However, it is important to remember that the order in which systems are implemented relies heavily on the current makeup of the organization’s technology stack. For example, although it might be tempting to take on the implementation of an AI-powered knowledge graph or a chat-bot that has Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities, the quality of your results and real-world usability of the product will increase dramatically if you also include other technologies such as a graph database to provide the foundation for a knowledge graph, or a Taxonomy Management System to allow for the design and curation of an enterprise taxonomy and/or ontology.

Depending on your organization’s level of maturity with respect to its technology ecosystem, the order in which systems are implemented must be strategically defined so that one system can build off of and enhance the previous. Typically, if an organization does not possess a solidified instance of any of the core KM technologies, the logical first step is to implement a Content Management System (CMS) or Document Management System (DMS), or in some cases, both. Following the “content first” approach, commonly used in web design and digitalization, organizations must first have a place in which they can effectively store, manage, and access their content, as an organization’s content is arguably one of its most valuable assets. Furthermore, one could argue that all core KM technologies are centered around an organization’s content and exist to improve/enhance that content whether it is adding to its structure, creating ways to more efficiently store and describe it, or more effectively searching and retrieving it at the time of need.

Once an organization has a solidified CMS solution in place, the next step is to implement tools geared towards the enhancement and findability of that content. One system in particular that helps to drastically improve the quality of an organization’s content by managing and deploying enterprise wide taxonomies and ontologies is a Taxonomy Management Systems (TMS). TMS solutions are integrated with an organization’s CMS and search tools and serve as a place to create, deploy, and manage poly-hierarchical taxonomies in a single place. TMS tools allow organizations to add structure to their content, describe it in a way that significantly improves organization, and fuel search by providing a set of predefined values from a controlled vocabulary that can be used to create facets and other forms of search-narrowing instruments. A common approach to implementing your technology ecosystem involves the simultaneous implementation of an enterprise search solution alongside the TMS implementation. Once again, the idea of one solution building off another is present here, as enterprise search tools feed off of the previously implemented CMS instance by utilizing Access Control List (ACL) specifications, security trimming considerations, content structure details, and many more. Once these three systems are in place, organizations can afford to look into additional tools such as Knowledge Graphs, AI-powered chatbots, and Metadata Catalogs.

Defining Business Logic and Common Uses

There is a great deal of preparation involved with the implementation of KM technologies, especially when considering the envisioned use of the system by organizational staff. As part of this preparation, a thorough analysis of existing business processes and standard operating procedures must be executed to account for the specific needs of users and how those needs will influence the design of the target system. Although it is not always initially obvious, the way in which a system is going to be used will heavily impact how that system is designed and implemented. As such, the individuals responsible for implementation must have a well-documented, thorough understanding of what end users will need from the tool, combined with a comprehensive list of core use cases. These types of details are most commonly elicited through a set of analysis activities with the system’s expected users.

Without these types of preliminary activities, the implementation process will seldom go as planned. This is because various detours will have to be taken to accommodate the business process details that are unique to the organization and therefore not ‘pre-baked’ into software solutions. These considerations sometimes come in the form of taxonomy/controlled list requirements, customizable workflows, content type specifications, and security concerns, to name a few.

If the proper arrangements aren’t made before implementing software and integrating with additional systems, it will almost always affect the scope of your implementation effort. Software implementation is not a “one size fits all” type of effort; there are certain design elements that are based on the business and functional requirements of the target solution, and these must be identified in the initial stages of the project. EK has seen how the lack of these preparatory activities can have impacts on project timelines, most commonly because of delays due to unforeseen circumstances. This results in extended deadlines, change requests, additional investment, and other general inefficiencies.

Recruiting the Proper Resources

In addition to the activities needed before implementation, it is absolutely essential to ensure that the appropriate resources are assigned to the project. This too can create issues down the road if not given the appropriate amount of time and attention before beginning the project. Generally speaking, there are a few standard roles that are necessary for any implementation project, regardless of the type or complexity of the effort. These roles are listed and described below:

• KM Designer/Consultant: Regardless of the type of system to be implemented, having a KM consultant on board is needed for various reasons. A KM consultant will be able to assist with the non-developmental areas of the project, for example designing taxonomies/ontologies, content types, search experiences, and/or governance structures.
• Senior Solutions Architect: Depending on the level of integration required, a Senior Solutions Architect is likely required. This is ideally a person with considerable experience working with multiple types of technologies that are core to KM. This person should have a thorough and comprehensive understanding of how to arrange systems into a technology suite and how each component works, both alone and as part of a larger, combined solution. Familiarity with REST, SOAP, and RPC APIs, along with other general knowledge about the communication between software is a must.
• Technology Subject Matter Expert (SME): This role is absolutely critical to the success of the implementation, as there will be a need for someone who specializes in the type of software being implemented. For example, if an organization is working to implement a TMS and integrate it with other systems, the project will need to staff a TMS integration SME to ensure the system is installed according to implementation best practices. This person will also be responsible for a large portion of the “installment” of the software, meaning they will be heavily involved with the initial set up and configuration based on the organization’s specific use of the system.
• KM Project Manager: As is common with all projects, there will be a need for a project manager to coordinate meetings, ensure the project is on schedule, and facilitate the ongoing alignment of all engaged parties. This person should be familiar with KM so that they can align efforts with best practices and help facilitate KM-related decisions.
• API Developer(s): Depending on the level of integration required, a developer may be needed to develop code to serve as a connector between systems. This individual must be familiar with the communication logic needed between systems and have a thorough understanding of APIs as well. The programming language in which any custom coding is needed will vary from organization to organization, but it is required that the developer has experience with the identified language.

The list above is by no means exhaustive, nor does it contain resources that are commonly assumed to be a part of any implementation effort. These roles are simply the unique ones that help with successful implementations. Also, depending on the level of effort required, there may be a need for multiple resources at each role, such as the developer or SME role. This type of consideration is important, as the project will need to have ample resources according to the project’s defined timeline.

Defining a Realistic Timeline

One final factor to consider when preparing for a technology solution implementation effort is the estimated time with which the project is expected to be completed. Implementation efforts are notoriously difficult to estimate in terms of time and resources needed, which often results in the over- or under- allocation of financing for a given effort. As a result of this, it’s recommended to err on the side of caution and incorporate more time than is initially estimated for the project to reach completion. If similar efforts have been completed in the past, utilize informal benchmarking. If available resources have experience implementing similar solutions, bring them to the forefront. The best way to estimate the level of effort and time needed to complete certain tasks is to look at historical data, which in this case would be previous implementation efforts.

In EK’s experience implementing large scale and highly complex software and custom solutions, we have learned that it is important to prepare for the unexpected to ensure the expected timeline is not derailed by unanticipated delays. For example, one common consideration we have encountered many times and one that has created significant delays is the need to get individuals appropriate access to certain systems or organizational resources. This is especially relevant with third-party consultants and when the system(s) in question have high security requirements. Additionally, there are several KM-related considerations that can unexpectedly lengthen a project’s timeline, such as the quality/readiness of content, governance standards and procedures that may be lacking, and/or change management preparations.

Conclusion

There are many factors that go into an implementation effort and, unfortunately, a lot of ways one can go wrong. Very seldom are projects like these executed to perfection, and a majority of the times that they fail or go awry is due to one or a combination of a few of the factors mentioned above. The good news and common theme with these considerations is that these pitfalls can mostly be avoided with the proper planning, preparation, and estimates (with regards to both time and resources). The initial stages of an implementation effort are the most critical, as these are the times where project planners need to be honest and realistic with their projections. There is often the tendency to begin development as soon as possible, and to skip most of the preparatory activities due to an eagerness to get started. It is important to remember that successful implementation efforts require the necessary legwork, even if it may seem superfluous at the time. Does your company need assistance implementing a piece of technology and is not sure how to get started? EK provides end-to-end services beginning with strategy and design and ending with the implementation of fully functional KM systems. Reach out to us! Contact us with any questions or general inquiries.

The post Constructing KM Technology: Tips for Implementing Your KM Technology Solutions appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

In many ways, our established goals for 2019 were a continuation of our aspirations from the previous year. We sought to continue our growth curve, expand our team, maintain our strong relationships with our clients, and deepen our special culture of collaboration and kindness. I can summarize our achievements in these areas using EK’s six guiding principles: People, Thought Leadership, Transparency, Partnership, Integration, and Energy. 

People – Our number one asset is our people. We invest in them and ensure they possess the knowledge and resources to serve our clients to the highest degree possible.

As an organization, we’ve always chosen to invest in our team, focusing on hiring and developing individuals’ business and technical skills while celebrating the unique culture and individuality they bring to EK. In 2019, we continued to hone our recruiting and interviewing practices to ensure we were finding the best “EK Rockstars” to provide exceptional delivery for our clients as well as strong collaboration with our colleagues. As a result, we are now the largest dedicated Knowledge Management consultancy in the world.

Maintenance and evolution of our culture of kindness, fun, and collaboration continued to be one of our greatest areas of focus. For the third year in a row, Washington Business Journal recognized us as one of their Best Places to Work, and Inc. Magazine recognized us nationally as one of the best workplaces in the United States for the second year in a row. 

We’ve codified our culture in eight guiding elements we refer to as the EK Way.  These are Kindness, Leadership, Voice, Collaboration, Balance, Growth, Ownership, and Fun. Each of these speaks to how we want every member of the team to feel empowered to be themselves and take ownership at EK. Over the course of the last year, we’ve continued our efforts to reinforce the EK Way and ensure every member of the team, new and old, knows what it means to be a member of this organization.

As I’ve stated in past years, one of my favorite benefits is that every employee receives $3,000 for their own chosen growth and learning. I see a passion for lifelong learning as one of an EK’ers greatest traits. The passion with which our team members have leveraged this benefit serves them well, as well as our clients who benefit from their development. The team chose an assortment of training, certifications, and conferences this year, including Knowledge Graph Design and Modeling, Cornell Product Management Program, Data Management and Governance, The Working Ontologist, Agile Product Owner Certification, Advanced Certified Scrum Master, DevOps, AWS Cloud Practitioner, User Experience (UX) with Content Design, Elasticsearch Engineering, and Boston University’s Masters in Computer and Information Systems. 

This year it has also been gratifying to see how the team is taking ownership of the office culture and shaping the benefits and perks that motivate them. One example of this is how the holidays came to EK this year in a way that hasn’t happened before. For Halloween, the entire office transformed into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, complete with costumes and a themed lunch. In December, we’ve always done a big holiday potluck and a “Purple Elephant” (our version of a White Elephant gift grab, where EK supplies the gifts – this year I think the favorite was the electric scooter). New this year, however, were the various themed events in December, including a holiday movie day and EK Gingerbread House decorating contests. We also started fun new traditions, like catered lunches any day we win a new account, themed for the location of our new client, and our version of “ringing the sales bell,” where new accounts are introduced by swinging one of the company lightsabers. Individually, each of these elements might be described as fun or unique, but taken as a whole they represent the team taking it upon themselves to craft EK into the place that makes them happy and where they feel at home.

On a personal note, I am excited to be taking one of the benefits for which I am most proud, EK’s parental leave benefit. Several years ago we established a policy including 13 weeks of paid maternity leave, as well as paid paternity leave. I’ve been happy to see many of my colleagues leveraging this benefit and we’ve celebrated every EK baby who has joined the family. Now, I’m excited to be starting my own paternity leave, further demonstrating that EK is an organization that values work and life balance, modeled from the top.

Thought Leadership – We serve as leaders in the industry, sharing our knowledge and expertise, guiding the development of agile knowledge and information practices, and supporting the community.

In 2019, EK published over 60 new blogs, infographics, articles, and videos in our website’s Knowledge Base. All of this material is completely open to the public without a login and represents a major element in our support of thought leadership in the field. We also spoke at over 15 different conferences, including Taxonomy Boot Camp, KMWorld, KMI Showcase, KMI Agile and Design Thinking Certification Course, SEMANTiCs 2019, DoD and Federal Knowledge Management Symposium, OmniChannelX, Graphorum, CTAA, PMIWDC, Agile DC, Agile New England, Digital PM Summit, and KM Midwest Symposium. 

We also supported the community by expanding the events we host and deliver in our space. Over the course of the year, we hosted the Knowledge Management Community of DC, Content Strategy DC, Enterprise Knowledge Graphs, and Design Thinking DC. 

Demonstrating our continued leadership in the KM space, I chaired the Knowledge Management Institute’s annual Knowledge Management Showcase and will do so again this coming March. Under my leadership, the conference grew to be a two-day, two-track event, including a track on real world case studies. Confirmed speakers from the Peace Corps, National Park Service, Hilton, GSA, and Inter-American Development Bank presented real world case studies that demonstrated the true value of KM.  

As another major new thought leadership initiative, EK is teaming with Semantic Web Company to bring their long-running SEMANTiCs conference to the United States for the first time ever. EK COO Joe Hilger will be serving as chairperson at this inaugural event being held this coming April in Austin, TX. We anticipate it will quickly become the premiere North American conference regarding Enterprise AI, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing.

We were also pleased to be recognized by Information Today as one of KMWorld’s 100 Companies that Matter in KM for the fifth year in a row, and were happy to have a total of seven EK team members speaking at their annual conference this year.

Transparency – We communicate clearly and openly, ensuring the highest level of quality and accountability for our company’s management, in our service to our clients, and with respect to our colleagues.

For us, transparency means that our team members, clients, and partners all know what we’re doing and why. For our clients, this means partnering with them in order to share successes, clearly communicate, and jointly address challenges. For our employees, this means establishing a clear sense of what’s working and what isn’t at EK, talking about it honestly, and working together to trend towards better. That’s why we’ve continued our bi-weekly knowledge sharing sessions, where EK’s leadership provides updates on the company and team members share what they’re working on and teach areas in which they’ve developed expertise. 

As with every year, we also communicated measurable goals and expectations regarding company performance at our annual Winter Gala. These included the standard elements regarding revenue, headcount, and client retention, but also included specific elements regarding employee development and growth. To better communicate with the team and help everyone understand the “what and why” of EK’s priorities, we also recently published a roadmap for 2020 that includes major initiatives regarding hires, onboarding, recruiting, marketing, and rollout of our new company intranet. This is another way we’re striving to model the type of work we often do for our clients, by giving each member of the team the insight into what they can expect and further seeking their involvement in shaping our priorities and guiding these assorted initiatives.

Partnership – We partner with our clients, building meaningful relationships founded on a sustained commitment to mutual success.

Our most successful engagements and greatest client relationships are those where we develop a true spirit of partnership and collaboration. This year was full of both new and existing clients engaging in that spirit of partnership with us. We were thrilled to host many of these clients in our office over the course of the year, and enjoyed working with them as fellow team members, while also “showing off” our culture and work spirit. Our clients this year leveraged our office for strategy sessions and training and also visited us to get to know the team better. 

This spirit of client partnership resulted in EK once again maintaining the vast majority of our core accounts over the course of the year, while adding an array of exciting new organizations that we’ve begun to support. I was also thrilled to see many previous clients come back to EK asking to engage in additional services with us. It is a huge validation for us to receive the referrals and praise we do from our clients, but it is even more special to see a client pushing their organization to engage with us again after previous successful work. All of this effort resulted in EK being listed on the Inc. 5000 List of Fastest Growing Companies in the United States for the second year in a row, an achievement less than 25% of companies ever listed have accomplished. We were also recognized by the Virginia Chamber of Commerce as one of Virginia’s 50 fastest growing companies, ranking at number 19 on the list. 

As with previous years, our partnerships also translate to active participation in the community. In 2019 we continued our longstanding support for the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts by continuing to fund their childhood education programs. We also continued our work with Bridges to Independence, an Arlington-based charity that works to lead individuals and families out of homelessness and into stable, independent futures. In addition to financial support, EK employees leveraged their expertise to help Bridges with strategic communications, visioning, and public speaking training. We also hosted a summer intern from their program for the second year in a row. 

This year, at the request of team members, we added a No Shave November (or, for us, a Know Shave Knowvember) competition as well as a coat drive. Each team member who participated identified their charitable organization of choice and EK donated to them at the end of the month. These organizations included: Girls Who Code, NAMI, Autism Speaks, Alzheimers Foundation of America, the Prevent Cancer Foundation, Welles Remy Crowther Charitable Trust, the Tom Coughlin Jay Fund, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, the Rotary Foundation of Rotary International, and St. Judes Christian Hospital.

Integration – We provide our customers with the full range of EK’s expertise, integrating all of our services and resources to ensure the greatest business value.

In 2019, the average size and scope of our client engagements increased significantly.  More and more of our clients are asking us to move beyond strategy with them in order to help realize multi-year Knowledge Management and Enterprise AI transformations. With our unique place in the market delivering strategy, design, and implementation services, we’re able to deliver on multi-year commitments to our clients and help them show true return on investment and demonstrable progress iteratively.  

As part of this commitment, EK expanded our work with semantics and knowledge artificial intelligence to create a new set of service offerings we call Enterprise AI. These services help an organization to plan, test, and iteratively build the capabilities in artificial intelligence being sought around the world, ensuring data and content are fully integrated, findable, and actionable. We are now expanding on these service offerings to deliver advanced semantic search capabilities as well. These services perfectly integrate with our core KM offerings, deepening our capabilities to ensure organizations receive the right KM foundations as well as the advanced capabilities to fully leverage all of their people and information.

EK also achieved another milestone this year, receiving an award on the General Services Administration’s Professional Services Contract. This new contract is yet another avenue to ensure we can provide our fully integrated advanced service offerings not just to the world’s leading commercial organizations and nonprofits, but also to the U.S. Government.

Energy – We share our enthusiasm with our clients and colleagues, leveraging our excitement in order to achieve meaningful change.

Our many achievements over the last year have only been made possible due to the dedication and energy of the team at EK. That energy has magnified as we’ve grown, with new individuals bringing their own ideas and brand of energy to our organization. Our clients are increasingly seeing how EK is different in this way, and I truly believe it has become one of our major differentiators. With our energy, we bring kindness and care for our fellow colleagues, partners, and clients. With this, we’ve become not just the largest or most advanced KM Consultancy in the world, we’ve also become a model for how organizations big and small wish to operate and grow. Increasingly, our clients are asking us to help them replicate this model, and we are thrilled to help them do so.

Most importantly, increasingly at EK I’m not the one driving this energy. The energy at EK has become self-sustaining and group-driven. As I begin my paternity leave, I’m confident the team will be stewards of EK and suppliers of our energy in my absence. As CEO, that may be my greatest achievement. Of course that said, I can’t wait to get back next month and see the amazing progress the team has made towards our 2020 goals to continue our growth, build our culture, and serve our clients.

The post EK’s Year in Review – 2019 appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Applying any of the principles identified in the above infographic can upgrade your search strategy to a future-ready, semantic experience. Whether you think your search needs a simple update or is ready for a serious upgrade, we can help. EK offers a range of search-specific services that will produce actionable recommendations. Please feel free to contact us for more information.

The post The 5 Key Components of a Semantic Search Experience appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

EK has six guiding principles we focus on throughout all that we do. It seems appropriate that these should be the structure around which I review our year.

People

EK continued to grow this past year, adding expert consultants to deepen our capabilities in Knowledge Management, Taxonomy Design, and Agile Transformation and Facilitation. We also kicked off our College recruiting plan, hiring our first college graduate from Dickinson College, a personal source of pride for me as this is my Alma Mater.

Every member of our team utilized one of my favorite benefits, a $3,000 guaranteed budget for lifelong learning, enabling each employee to continue their education, attend conferences, or take other professional classes or certifications. It is one of EK’s core beliefs that we must always invest in our team and help them develop.

We also added new benefits for our employees this year. We created a parental leave benefit that provides up to 13 weeks of paid leave. We also added additional insurance benefits, health benefits including gym membership reimbursement, and added a new corporate holiday in the day after Thanksgiving (because no one should have to work with that much tryptophan in their system). 

Thought Leadership

EK published over forty new blogs and articles on our newly designed website, and spoke at over twenty different conferences and events including Taxonomy Boot Camp, KMWorld, eLearning Guild Learning Solutions Conference, AgileDC, Regional Scrum Gathering in Portugal, KMI Showcase, and Agile Dev East, amongst others.  

We were recognized for this thought leadership, named by KMWorld as one of the 100 Companies that Matter in KM for the second year, recognized by CIO Review as one of the 20 Most Promising KM Solution Providers, and by the Global KM Congress as one of the world’s 50 most influential KM professionals.

Transparency

Our aim has always been to operate our business in a clearly transparent manner to both our clients and our employees. This builds a sense of trust, proven by the fact that in 2016 we are closing the year having maintained all of the major clients we began the year with, and have added several more. Moreover, our stellar employee retention is representative of the manner in which we comport ourselves.  

One of our new tools to encourage transparency, along with greater collaboration and team development, was the opening of our Corporate Headquarters in Arlington, VA this year. The office exemplifies our style and spirit, filled with collaborative spaces (including our round whiteboard room) as well as areas to celebrate our successes.

We’ve worked to be transparent with our team by communicating our goals and how we’re performing against them regularly throughout the year. We announced our annual performance goals and metrics during our Winter Gala this past February and updated the team during our bi-weekly knowledge sharing sessions as well as during our quarterly offsites. At every step of the way, the team knew where we were under-performing and over-performing and was thereby able to flex and provide their considerable energy and talents where they were needed most.  

As the year closes, we didn’t hit all of our goals, but none of that is a surprise to our team because we’ve been communicating every step of the way and leveraging their inputs to plan for an even stronger 2017.

Partnership

As I mentioned above, it is a great source of pride for us that we’ve maintained working relationships with all of our core clients from a year ago. For some, our support has grown as their needs have increased or their understanding of how we can help them has expanded, for others, we’ve moved to a smaller role as we’ve transferred our knowledge to them and moved to a support role. Consistent through all of these partnerships, however, is the fact that we’ve maintained the trust with our clients.

Over the course of the year, in addition to maintaining our partnerships with each of our core clients, we’ve added several new clients both in the government and commercial spaces. Our work has also taken us abroad, with efforts this year in England, Portugal, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Uganda, and Mexico.

Our partnerships also extend to our philanthropic efforts and community involvement. This year we formed philanthropic partnerships with Wolftrap Center for the Performing Arts children’s program and Linden Resources, and continued our support for the Leadership Center for Excellence. We also instituted a new employee benefit, allowing each team member to take a day each quarter volunteering with one of our philanthropic partners instead of their normal work.

Arlington County also recognized us as one of the County’s fastest growing companies, showing us again that our hard work is yielding the type of results that stand out every day.

Integration

We’ve chosen to focus on a core set of expert services, rather than to be generalists. Though we’re proud of all the work we deliver, we’ve found we provide the greatest value to our clients when these services are integrated.  

Our success stories this year, with clients including the National Park Service, Pearson, Inter American Development Bank, and World Bank are each examples of this. For each of these customers, and many others, we’ve combined our discrete services offerings into a complete Agile Knowledge and Information Management solution that addresses their needs and yields true business value.

We succeeded this year in being awarded a contract on the GSA Information Technology Schedule 70 Contract, meaning that over the next year and into the future we will have the opportunity to bring more of these integrated solutions to Federal agencies in addition to commercial organizations, nonprofits, and international organizations.

Energy

If you’ve read this far, at this point, I hope you agree with me that EK is unique and, frankly, pretty awesome. After nearly fifty years, combined, of consulting years for Joe and I, not a week goes by that we don’t marvel at the amazing team with whom we have the pleasure to work every day.  

Though there are any number of things that make them remarkable, one of the most unique is the level of energy, enthusiasm, and positivity they bring to bear in everything they do. This year alone, I’ve marvelled at the number of times our clients have described team members by terms including “unbelievable,” “indispensable,” and “magical,” just to name a few. Coming to work is fun. Personally, I feel like I’ve won the lottery (and if I actually did, I’d still come to work every day at EK).  

I sometimes refer to the team as rock stars or superheroes, because that’s how I see them, and it is certainly how they perform for our clients.  

As we look forward to 2017, we are poised to grow our team and spread this energy even farther with our client partners. Continuing to find and reward the best People, we will maintain and expand our efforts in Thought Leadership, while bringing our Integrated capabilities to our clients in Partnership every day, delivering successes to them that leverage our Energy, Transparent delivery, and expert guidance at every step.

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