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.

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.

Our goal is that this document helps our fellow KM practitioners apply core Agile principles to our KM work and helps you explain KM’s value to your stakeholders. We’ve included a link at the bottom of this page for you to provide us with direct feedback. Your input will guide the future iterations of The Agile KM Manifesto and ensure that this document continues to be driven by the KM community. 

The 2022 Agile KM Manifesto

When developing Knowledge Management strategies and systems, we must adopt an inclusive approach that continuously incorporates the changing needs of our organizations, stakeholders, and end-users. Knowledge workers’ needs center around getting the right information at the right time with minimal friction. As KM practitioners, we can apply Agile principles to more efficiently and effectively meet those needs. The Agile KM Manifesto applies the values and principles from the original Agile Manifesto to a collection of Knowledge Management principles across interrelated KM disciplines. 

What we’ve found is that Agility maximizes the KM value derived from the successful integration of People, Process, Content, Culture, and Technology. Rather than restate the values found in the Agile Manifesto, we have created five statements of value: 

People 

Communicating the value of KM and how individual roles contribute to KM, is inherently valuable. Crafting that message in a way that addresses users’ goals, motivations, and frustrations ensures understanding and engagement.

Process 

Value is maximized when your KM processes continuously address the full knowledge lifecycle: capturing, creating, managing, storing, enhancing, sharing, and governing your knowledge.

Content 

Content is only valuable when it can easily be found and leveraged by users. Good KM connects people to content and each other. This enables expertise to be shared and creates institutional knowledge.

Culture 

The value of a KM strategy and practices is only sustainable when KM processes are thoughtfully integrated into users’ formal responsibilities and day-to-day activities, rather than understood as separate ‘extra’ tasks. 

Technology

Technical tools and systems create the most value when they enable and support specific components of your KM Strategy. Ensure technology serves as a means to unlock the value created by your People, Processes, Content, and Culture. 

To unlock the value that effective Knowledge Management creates, leverage the following guiding principles as your KM initiatives dictate:

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If you want to be successful with a merger and acquisition (M&A) transaction, consider developing a Knowledge Management (KM) Strategy to guide the process.  One of the most important factors in achieving a successful M&A transaction is “effective integration.” But what does effective integration mean? At EK, we encourage organizations to consider analyzing integration from the five KM perspectives of People, Process, Content, Culture, and Technology. This analysis includes defining both a current state and target state for all five areas. Let’s take a look at how KM best practices for each of those five KM areas can help you achieve an effective integration during a M&A transaction.

People

The people aspect of KM refers to how the overarching structure of leadership and staff supports knowledge flow throughout the organization, and how people communicate and connect with one another to more effectively create and share knowledge. Traditionally, a large portion of M&A transactions have focused on acquiring thoughts, methodologies, people, and relationships. When two separate entities combine forces to create a new organization, or when a company takes over another, people and relationships from both sides are inevitably impacted. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is now even more important to determine whether both entities have enough employees and resources to successfully continue business operations. A KM Strategy can help identify and prioritize the skill sets required at all levels in the organization to grow the new, joint business. 

Most importantly, it is essential to analyze the softer and more human side of employees during a transaction. Employees from the two entities may experience different levels of anxiety that emanate from uncertainty around job security and future responsibilities. Addressing their concerns, and considering how to utilize their skills under the new structure will not only help establish high-performing teams, but most importantly, will boost morale and help keep employees happy. Increasing employee satisfaction in turn improves retention rates and reduces turnover, ensuring the organization holds on to motivated individuals who are then willing to create and share innovative content that would have otherwise been lost if they had been left the organization. Additionally, strengthening leadership and workforce around KM practices, such as establishing rewards and recognition mechanisms for sharing knowledge and embedding content management tasks in daily job processes  can help create value from the knowledge held by both organizations, while encouraging knowledge creation, retention, and collaboration. 

The creation of Communities of Practice and other similar knowledge sharing mechanisms can help improve the performance of members from both organizations by enabling individuals who share common objectives and work practices to discuss and find ways to improve them. Additionally, these knowledge sharing mechanisms can help encourage innovation in the new merged organization and enable individuals to learn from others that they might not interact with on a daily basis. Even though calculating the return on investment (ROI) of knowledge sharing mechanisms can be seen as challenging, consider estimating the cost savings due to knowledge sharing activities. For example, you can estimate the number of hours that members of a Community of Practice can save when they are able to find templates or subject matter experts on the community page to accomplish specific business objectives that otherwise would have taken them a long time. Another example of ROI for knowledge sharing activities is estimating call deflection for internal support teams. By having support documentation available in a knowledge sharing repository (e.g. an internal IT Support page), the new joint organization can save time and money as a result of the reduction of phone calls, emails, and chat sessions from employees to the IT team. 

Process

Before deciding to move forward with a M&A transaction, you need to understand each side’s business operations, along with associated business processes, key players, and any major pain points. Typically, mid-level managers from various business areas are tasked with integrating their own operations with the other company’s operations without fully understanding what it takes to be successful. A KM Strategy can certainly help with the effort of identifying and improving core business processes for the merged organization. From a KM perspective, a primary goal of optimizing business processes should be to systematically capture, manage, and enhance information, while making optimal use of resources, minimizing costs, and maintaining high-quality operations. Hand-in-hand with process optimization should be the decision on which business processes to automate. Business process automation involves identifying which specific steps or recurring tasks could be executed with a technology and then choosing the right tool to achieve it. Optimizing business processes and automating them wherever possible will allow organizations to experience better flow of information, increased efficiency, streamlined tasks, better utilization of resources, and end-to-end visibility of the new, joint operations. 

From a content management perspective, understanding how key organizational content gets created, tagged, and shared is also critical. Identifying not only what the major areas of content are, but also who the content creators and content owners are, where content is stored, which taxonomies are leveraged for tagging, and most importantly how content flows through the organization will get you in the right direction to manage content effectively. Successful integration of the two organizations in a M&A transaction involves translating very distinct content management processes from each party into new, joint content management processes that align with the business goals of the M&A transaction. As part of a KM Strategy, a  robust content and taxonomy governance plan will help you define the roles, responsibilities, policies, and processes necessary to support the flow of content in the new organization. 

Content

As you explore the possibility of a M&A, it is essential to determine the knowledge, information, and data management needs of the target state for the merged organization. Performing a content inventory and developing a content clean-up strategy for both entitiesare recommended first steps. A content inventory will allow the merged organization to assess the state of content from various content sources (e.g., document management systems, content management systems, shared drives, etc.), achieve a full understanding of each system’s content (types of content, volume, state, and location), and define a content strategy. The content strategy should address the optimization of content types as well as the definition of user-centric business taxonomies that would help achieve the ideal state for content creation, management, and search. A complete content inventory and a thorough clean-up effort are part of the foundational activities needed to achieve an optimal enterprise search experience, especially after a M&A transaction where outdated or inaccurate content could pose a risk to the operations of the merged organization.With so much information available from both organizations it will be difficult to determine what is current or what is relevant unless a content clean-up effort has been completed. 

Following the completion of the content inventory, both organizations need to assess the quality of their content to inform future clean-up or migration efforts (whether to maintain, delete, or archive certain content), and determine a governance plan to ensure the effectiveness and sustainability of any new content management activities. As a next step, it’s important to determine whether the existing technologies meet the business’ knowledge, information, and data management needs or whether new technologies will be needed after the M&A is complete. The goal of conducting a content inventory and developing a content clean-up strategy is to ensure that people have access to the most relevant and up-to-date content (NERDy content), while experiencing improved content findability and reduced content clutter that may result from the M&A effort.  

Culture

From a KM perspective, culture refers to employees’ willingness to share, collaborate, and support one another, and whether innovation and change are encouraged and valued across the organization. During a M&A, you are merging more than two companies’ assets, products, and services. Most importantly, you are merging people, personalities, and organizational cultures. Additionally, if you consider a global merger, you are integrating with other nation’s cultures and languages which adds even more complexity. Organizational culture can positively or negatively influence many aspects of a company including sales, profits, employee engagement, collaboration, and even recruiting activities. A unique and fun corporate culture can be considered among the most important assets for certain organizations. However, a M&A could change that overnight. 

Although a company’s culture is especially shaped by its founder and executives, it is highly influenced by employees’ experiences and daily work practices. From a KM perspective, people management practices from both organizations need to be analyzed and validated to determine compatibility, ideally before moving forward with the merger. The lack of compatibility in corporate cultures and people management practices increases the likelihood of a failed M&A transaction and poses a serious risk to the expected synergy among employees from both organizations to effectively work together to create, and share knowledge under the newly merged organization. Furthermore, this could impact the definition of measurable success criteria that make sense to everyone in the new organization to track productivity and progress with KM initiatives. The changes introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic have also posed new questions for organizations as leaders reflect on how to sustain culture and best manage their people while they are working remotely. A KM Strategy can help overcome many of these challenges by helping evaluate, among other things, whether the organizations involved in the transaction encourage innovation, knowledge sharing, collaboration, and openness to change, and whether measurable success criteria exist to demonstrate the value of KM initiatives.  Conducting a cultural assessment of both organizations before moving forward with the M&A is a key component of the KM Strategy to determine whether the merger of people, personalities, and organizational cultures would work. 

Technology

One of the biggest challenges during a M&A is dealing with the different systems and technologies from both organizations and not having a clear plan on which ones to use or how to consolidate them. Often, after a M&A, the merged organization ends up with a lot of different technologies, including “shadow IT” (technologies and applications introduced to the organization without explicit approval from an IT department) that makes it difficult for employees to work efficiently, and for the IT department to support them effectively. The use of “shadow IT” has increased exponentially in recent years, especially due to the availability of free or low cost cloud-based applications and services. After a M&A transaction is completed, the sudden appearance of siloed applications, or duplicated, overlapping technologies as a result of shadow IT from each organization makes managing content effectively and achieving enterprise search a challenge. Furthermore, by definition, technologies that are considered shadow IT are not standardized or accessible across the organization, compromising access to content and potentially impacting the completion of daily job functions successfully. The COVID-19 pandemic has also introduced a new technology challenge due to the manner in which M&A are now being developed and negotiated. Nowadays, executives and other key personnel – buyers, sellers, providers of M&A financing, and legal advisors – involved in M&A transactions are working remotely, increasing the need to identify real-time collaboration technologies that allow them to interact with each other in a time-efficient manner. 

Creating an inventory of technologies, systems and applications used by the two companies as part of a KM Strategy will get you started on the right path. Before making decisions about which systems to maintain and which ones to consolidate, you need to know what you have in-house. Next steps include determining the technology needs for the merged organization and conducting technology assessments. These assessments will help you make better, people-focused decisions when it comes to KM technology as you determine the need for office productivity systems, document management systems, content management systems, process automation applications, collaboration tools, taxonomy and ontology tools, search engines, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions, among others. Finally, training end users and determining the level of support that your IT department can provide will help achieve the desired level of systems adoption. 

At EK, we believe that even though choosing the right technology is an important KM element in a M&A transaction, the other four elements (People, Process, Content, and Culture) should be the driving forces of the transaction. If those four elements are aligned correctly, choosing the technology that will support them should be the final step that optimizes operations and how people work together.

Conclusion

Despite the effort that organizations go through to achieve their goal of performance improvement through a M&A, the results are often disappointing and differ from the results originally predicted. Knowing that one of the biggest problems that companies encounter during a M&A transaction is the lack of planning around integration at various organizational levels, incorporating a KM Strategy early in the process is a smart way towards a smooth and successful M&A transaction.

If you need help designing a KM Strategy for your M&A, contact us.

The post 5 Reasons Why Mergers and Acquisitions Need KM 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.

When we set our goals for 2018, we knew that we were aiming high, but as the team grew, our individual strengths combined to form something incredibly special. As a team, we gained the confidence to be bold in our aspirations. I’ve often said that good Knowledge Management creates a happy team, and a happy team creates good Knowledge Management. More than ever before, we modeled that philosophy over the course of the year.

EK’s six guiding principles are People, Thought Leadership, Transparency, Partnership, Integration, and Energy. The review of our year fits well within these principles.

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’m proud to note that our philosophy of hiring and investing in full-time salaried staff has resulted in EK being one of the largest dedicated Knowledge Management consultancies in the world.

With this growth, we placed particular focus on maintaining our culture. We’ve developed as an organization in a way that many of our employees would describe the culture as caring, supportive, and family-oriented. Our five-star rating on Glassdoor, as well as the awards we’ve won for being a great place to work are a testament to this. This year, Washington Business Journal again recognized us as one of their Best Places to Work in 2018, and Inc. Magazine recognized us nationally as one of the best workplaces in the United States. These awards are extremely important to me, as they were dependent on our team answering anonymous surveys about their happiness and how they feel supported at work.

The fact that we’ve been able to maintain this culture while experiencing such rapid growth is a true testament to the team we’ve cultivated. Every member of our team feels empowered to serve as a guardian of EK’s culture of knowledge sharing, collaboration, and support. To reinforce our unique culture, our team developed and defined the “EK Way.” In the same way that our vision and principles guide our growth, delivery, and performance, the EK Way will bolster our internal culture as we continue to expand and evolve. The team derived six guiding elements of the EK Way: Leadership, Voice, Collaboration, Balance, Growth, Ownership, and Fun. This was personally one of my proudest moments of the year. The team documented the culture of a company I have always dreamed of leading. Expect more on this to come as I write about how we’re implementing the EK Way in 2019.

A sure sign of the strength and longevity of EK’s culture was demonstrated by the creation of an EK “Hangouts” group this year. This group emerged when several team members were discussing their assorted hobbies and decided they wanted to share these activities and experiences with their colleagues. The group quickly grew to be company-wide, promoting inclusive gatherings for employees of all levels, skills, and interests. Over the course of the year, separate individuals organized a Saturday hike, a rock climbing excursion, a book and movie night, a board game night, and a wine tasting event. To support the EK Hangouts group and the team building and positive nature the hangouts drive, we subsequently introduced a new benefit to fund the group and its activities. At its core, the EK Hangouts group is an example of one of the many ways in which the EK team is driving the culture of EK.

We also made several key personnel moves in 2018, promoting Lulit Tesfaye, Mary Little, and Rebecca Wyatt to EK’s Leadership team and promoting Yanko Ivanov to the position of Technology Partnership Manager. These moves represent our continued commitment to our people, as each of these new positions were filled by a well-tenured member of our team. These individuals have grown with EK and have helped to shape who we are, and they now have a continued mandate to do so. These moves constitute some of my proudest moments for EK in 2018.

One of the best ways that EK applied our resources in 2018 was on our people’s development. One of my favorite benefits is that every employee, regardless of tenure, receives $3,000 each year to continue their education and development. As lifelong learners, this is a big part of who we are. It was a pleasure to see how EK’ers applied this benefit in 2018. The team chose various classes and conferences for their learning and development, such as Certified Scrum Master (CSM), UVA Darden School of Executive Education – Specialization in Design Thinking and Innovation, MIT Sloan & MIT CSAIL Artificial Intelligence Implications for Business Strategy Program, Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Certified Enterprise Architect, Enterprise Content Management Master Class, Certified Social Media Manager (CSMM), Nielsen Norman Group UX Research, and Training Magazine Gamification Conference and Level One Training. This learning directly translates to added value and an increase in thought leadership that we can offer to our clients.

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 2018, EK published nearly sixty new blogs, articles, and videos in our website’s Knowledge Base. This collection of materials is openly available to the public and serves as a key component of our commitment to support the community. In addition to that, we spoke at over fifteen different conferences and seminars, including Taxonomy Boot Camp, KMWorld, KMI Showcase, BAWorld, ACMP, KMI Agile and Design Thinking Certification Course, Semantic 2018, and Cognitive Computing Summit. Our presentations spanned three continents and over fifteen different speakers. The latter is of particular importance, as it demonstrates EK’s breadth of thought leaders.

We also expressed our commitment to thought leadership by expanding our office space to include a new classroom and learning center. Over the course of the year, the new space became the core meetup location for the Knowledge Management Community of DC and hosted several Design for DC meetups, as well as other agile, KM, and design thinking training and learning sessions.

As a testament to our continued growth in the KM space, I will also be chairing the Knowledge Management Institute’s annual Knowledge Management Showcase. Under my leadership, this conference is growing to be a two-track, two-day event focused on practical KM. Confirmed speakers from the Peace Corps, National Park Service, Hilton, GSA, and Inter American Development Bank will present real world case studies that demonstrate the true value of KM.

For these efforts and more, we were recognized by Information Today as KMWorld’s 100 Companies that Matter in KM for the fourth year in a row.

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.

At EK, our focus has been on ensuring our clients, partners, and team members know exactly where we stand, what we’re doing, where we feel we’ve achieved goals, and what we’ve potentially missed. We exhibit this internally in many ways, not least through our standing bi-weekly knowledge sharing sessions and open door approach to communications. We recently introduced Slack as a new tool so that the entire company has channels to “talk” and make their voices heard. These avenues for knowledge sharing not only enable us to celebrate our wins and our team, but also give us an important opportunity to share what has not worked and to discuss opportunities for improvement.

We also hit an important milestone in 2018. We celebrated EK’s five-year anniversary. During our offsite on the anniversary, all team members were paired and presented a lightning talk (five minutes) on where they see EK in the next five years. The ideas and energy expressed are being built into our strategic plan and will be guiding elements for EK in the future.

As we’ve done every year previously, we gathered the entire team at our annual Winter Gala. This event gives us the opportunity to toast the team, to report on how we closed the previous year, and to set goals for the year to come. It is incredibly important to me that every team member, from the most junior to the most senior, understands and is committed to their role in EK’s success. The true sense of ownership and responsibility the team feels is one of our greatest strengths.

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

The strength of our culture and the commitment of our team is reflected in the wonderful partnerships we’ve built with our clients. We’ve established incredible relationships built on trust and camaraderie with a host of organizations that I deeply respect and am proud to support. Again in 2018, our growth was fueled by the loyalty of our existing clients, as each of our major accounts from the previous year chose to continue working with us. We further expanded our relationships by adding several new marquis accounts, many of which were the product of referrals from existing clients. This growth resulted in EK being listed on the Inc. 5000 List of Fastest Growing Companies in the United States at number 1,289, an aspiration that Joe and I shared since we were both in our twenties.

With all of our growth, we’ve managed to fill our office to capacity, but we always make room for our clients to visit. Some of my favorite days of 2018 were those when our clients travelled to work at EK’s offices. With our collaborative spaces and a myriad of writable walls, we love to host our clients for workshops and other brainstorming sessions.

One of my proudest client moments this year was when the National Park Service’s Common Learning Portal, which we helped to design and build, was officially released to the public. This site, in my opinion, is one of the finest examples of knowledge management in practice and I’m so honored to be a part of it.

Our sense of partnership also extends to our participation in the community. This year, EK furthered our support for the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts by continuing to help fund their childhood education programs. We also formed a new relationship with a local, Arlington-based charity, Bridges to Independence, which works to lead individuals and families out of homelessness and into stable, independent futures. A private, nonprofit organization, Bridges has been working with and for homeless families since 1985. EK is proud to offer a range of support, offering financial support, funding events, and hosting a summer intern.

Our active participation in the community, focus on exceptional delivery, and unflagging support for our team resulted in the Arlington Chamber of Commerce naming Enterprise Knowledge as their 2018 Best Large Business of the Year.

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 2018, we found more of our clients traversing EK’s services, moving from a KM Strategy to implementation and development, or from taxonomy design to search, or from knowledge retention to content strategy. These services represent EK’s uniqueness in the marketplace as a full-service provider of KM strategy, design, and implementation services. This unique position that we hold in the market allows us to provide the most authentic and practical recommendations and applications, ensuring that KM theory becomes KM practice and results in organizational value.

By offering integrated services, from strategy, to design, implementation, and support, we are also opening opportunities for us to be at the forefront of KM technologies. This position will enable EK to help organizations lay the foundation to achieve Artificial Intelligence. Our growing focus in this area was an important part of our delivery in 2018 and will be an exciting step in our evolution in the years to come.

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

We infused the passion and energy of our team into everything that we did in 2018. We love what we do, we’re proud of our work, we care about our clients, and we appreciate our colleagues. A new member of the team this year said it beautifully: “EK’s office is full of joy.” I couldn’t say it better and often think about those words. I know that it is my job to personally ensure this sense of joy, and the energy that it generates, endures and grows.

Our focus is to share our energy and our passion for practical knowledge, data, and information management with our customers. We’ll continue our work as experts, driving this energy and the broader value of KM to each of our customers in 2019. I anticipate another year of exciting challenges and growth for EK. Thank you for being a part of our journey.

The post EK’s Year in Review – 2018 appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

The post Knowledge Management Benchmarking: Part 2 appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

The trajectory we find ourselves on is astounding, but not surprising. When you view the commitment, intelligence, and dedication of every single person that comprises EK, it is clear why we are where we are.

EK’s six guiding principles are People, Thought Leadership, Transparency, Partnership, Integration, and Energy. The review of our year, and our assorted accomplishments fits well within these categories.

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.

Beyond simply growing in headcount this year, EK realized several major achievements regarding our team. Over the course of 2017, we experienced zero attrition. No one left EK. In a very competitive job market and field, I’m extremely proud of this fact. It serves as a clear demonstration that we are honoring our team members for everything they do and are.

With this growth comes a need for more space, so this year we extended our lease on our company headquarters and began an expansion plan that will be completed in spring of 2018. Our office expansion will include new standing desks, additional casual meeting spaces and rooms, and a large open area for company-wide knowledge sharing sessions and other meetings.

The community recognized our benefits, culture, office space, and team members as well. In February, Washingtonian Magazine featured EK as one of their 50 Great Places to Work. In May, the Washington Business Journal followed this up by honoring us as one of their Best Places to Work in the DC area. Both of these recognitions were particularly meaningful as they required that our team answered anonymous surveys sharing their personal opinions of work and life at EK.

Once again in 2017, each member of the team leveraged one of my favorite benefits, a committed $3,000 budget for each employee to continue their lifelong learning through training, continuing education, and certifications. This is in service to our team, but also to our clients to ensure they’re always benefitting from the sharpest skill sets and latest advancements across the board.

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 2017, EK beat our record and published over sixty new blogs, articles, and videos on our website’s Knowledge Base. This collection of materials is openly available to the public, as a key component of our commitment to support the community. In addition to that, we spoke at over fifteen different conferences and seminars, including the DC Code(Her) Conference, Taxonomy Boot Camp, KMWorld, eLearning Guild Learning Solutions Conference, AgileDC, Web Content Mavens, KMI Showcase, Text Analytics Forum, BAWorld, ACMP, and KM Ark Group Australia. Our presentations spanned four continents and over a dozen speakers. The latter is of particular importance, as it demonstrates EK’s breadth of thought leaders across the organization.

Over the course of the year we also hosted a number of Agile, KM, Search, and Change Management meetups in our office. We anticipate this growing in the year to come, as our expanded office will also allow us to host larger meetups in our space, accommodating up to 50 seated attendees.

We were again recognized for our thought leadership, winning a spot on KMWorld’s 100 Companies that Matter in KM for the third year in a row.

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.

Over 2017, we found more and more clients coming to us asking to help them benchmark the state of their Knowledge Management and define a multi-year Agile strategy to transform their organization’s KM Maturity. Many of these organizations had tried and failed this in the past, but succeeded with EK because of the clear and practical ways we approach KM. This transparency and clarity is a key aspect of our client delivery and a real driver for our continued growth.

We apply this same transparency to our internal communications. We maintained our twice monthly all-company knowledge sharing sessions. These are important opportunities for the team to learn from each other and for Joe and me to share the company’s accomplishments and challenges.

As with every year, we set performance goals and challenges for the company and individual team members at our annual Winter Gala. At our knowledge sharing sessions and various offsites, we reviewed our progress toward these goals in order that each member of the team knew how we were doing and clearly understood how they could contribute. As we close the year, I’m proud to say that we’ve exceeded each primary milestone for growth, sales, and delivery that we set.

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

At the heart of EK is a focus on exceptional delivery and a commitment to long-term partnerships with our clients. We exemplified this in 2017 by maintaining relationships with each of our core clients we began the year with, and adding a number of new clients throughout the year. We keep, in the office, the many letters we receive from clients commending our work and our individuals. The fact that we’ve earned and maintained the trust and appreciation of our clients is what fuels us.

Several highpoints of the year for me were marked by our clients taking time from their schedules and traveling cross-country to EK for meetings because they wanted to come to us, get to know the whole team, and collaborate in our space. Our office is full of writable walls, including our round whiteboard room, and there’s little that makes me happier than to see each of these walls filled with great work, in service to our clients, populated by our entire team.

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.

Though each of our service areas stand alone, we’ve built our expertise and capabilities to provide cohesive solutions that feed off each other, just as we as individuals at EK are constantly focused on supporting, collaborating, and learning from each other. This year, we experienced more of our clients coming back to EK following an initial effort, seeking additional services.

EK’s delivery of integrated Agile Knowledge and Information Management services resulted in new wins both in the Commercial and Government space. We won our first prime contract on GSA’s Technology Schedule 70 Contract, and followed it with additional multi-year projects with other federal agencies with whom we hadn’t previously worked.

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

As with every year, amidst the hard work, we found time to celebrate our efforts, our clients, and our people. As the team knows, I talk about EK as my dream come true. I work every day to ensure they all feel that same way, allowing them to bring their energy and dedication to everything we do. We’re always looking for that next thing that will make work fun and fulfilling and will continue to do so through 2018.

We work to share this same energy with each of our clients, and I believe that effort is one of EK’s biggest differentiators. It is not simply our job to be experts, it is our responsibility to energetically and emphatically share that expertise with our clients and their colleagues. This energy, backed up by a profound belief in the value of what we’re doing and the meaningful ways it can help our partner clients is infectious. As we look to 2018, expect this energy to be infused in everything you see and do with EK. It is going to be an amazing year and we look forward to partnering with you throughout it.

The post EK’s Year in Review – 2017 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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