The post Knowledge Portals: Manifesting A Single View Of Truth For Your Organization appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

The following article highlights five key factors that design and implementation teams should consider when building a Knowledge Portal for their organizations.

Sources of Truth

Guillermo Galdamez

We define ‘sources of truth’ as the various systems responsible for generating data, recording transactions, or storing key documents about the vital business processes of an organization. These systems are fundamental to the day-to-day operations and long-term strategic objectives of the business. 

In a modern enterprise, the systems supporting diverse business processes can number in the dozens, if not hundreds, depending on the organization’s size. However, from the business perspective of a Knowledge Portal implementation, it is critical to prioritize integrations with each source based on appropriate criteria. Drawing from our experience, we’ve identified three key factors that Knowledge Portal leaders should consider:

• Business value. The source must contain data that is fundamental to both the business and to the Knowledge Portal’s objectives, aligning with the users’ expectations.
• Data readiness. The data within the source should be in a state ready for ingestion and aggregation (more on this in the next section). 
• Technical readiness. It may sound obvious, but the source systems need to be capable of providing data to the Knowledge Portal. In some cases, a source system might be under active development (and not yet operational), or it might have limited functionality for exporting the necessary data for the Knowledge Portal’s use cases.
  

Kate Erfle

A Knowledge Portal should draw from well-defined information sources that are recognized as being authoritative and trusted. A Knowledge Portal isn’t intended to act as the “source of truth” itself, but rather to aggregate and meaningfully connect data sources and repositories, providing a cohesive “view of truth.” 

As Guillermo pointed out, there are several key data and technical readiness factors to consider when integrating source systems within a Knowledge Portal ecosystem. For a successful implementation, the source systems should meet the following technical criteria:

• The data must be clean, consistent, and standardized (more on this in the next section).
• The data should be accessible in a standard, compatible format, either via an API or manual export.
• The data must be protected by necessary and appropriate security measures, or it should provide data points that can be used to implement and enforce these security measures.

Once a data source meets the established criteria for quality, import/export capabilities, and security, it becomes eligible for integration with the Knowledge Portal. Within the portal, it may be possible to create or update content, but the data source remains its own “source of truth”. All changes made within the Knowledge Portal should be reflected in the corresponding source system to maintain consistency, accuracy, and integrity of the source system data. During the design and implementation of a Knowledge Portal, it is critical to consider the impact of user actions and to ensure that any changes are accurately reflected in the source data. This approach ensures the continued accuracy and reliability of data from the source systems.

Information Quality

Guillermo Galdamez

One of the most common issues I encounter when talking to our clients is the perception that their data and unstructured content is unreliable. This could be due to various issues: the data might be incomplete, duplicative, outdated, or just plain wrong. As a result, employees can spend hours not only searching for information and data but also tracking down people who can confirm its reliability and usability.

In discussing content and data quality, one of the foundational steps is taking inventory of the ‘stuff’ contained within your prioritized sources of truth. Though the maxim “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” has often sparked debate about its merits, this is one occasion where it is notably relevant. It is important for the implementation team, as well as the business to have visibility of the data and content it means to ingest and display through the Knowledge Portal. Performing a content analysis is key in providing the Knowledge Portal team with the information they need to ensure that information provided by the Knowledge Portal is consistent, reliable, and timely. 

A content inventory and audit often reveals areas where data and content needs to be remediated, migrated, archived, or disposed of. The Knowledge Portal team should take this opportunity to perform data and content cleanup. During development, the Knowledge Portal Team can collaborate with various teams to improve data and content quality. Even following its launch, the Portal, by aggregating and presenting information in new ways, can reveal gaps or inconsistencies across its sources. It will be helpful to define feedback mechanisms between users, the Knowledge Portal Team, and data and content owners to be able to address instances where data and content needs to be maintained. 

Gaining and sustaining user trust is crucial for Knowledge Portals. Users will continuously visit the Portal as long as they perceive that it solves their previous challenges. If the Portal becomes a new ‘junk drawer’ for data, engagement will decline rapidly. To avoid this, implement a strong change management and communications strategy to continually remind users about the Portal’s capabilities and value.

Kate Erfle

Maintaining high-quality data and content is crucial for a Knowledge Portal’s success. As Guillermo stated, the implementation phase of a Knowledge Portal offers the perfect opportunity for data cleanup.

To begin, it’s important for individual system owners and administrators to do what is feasible within their systems to ensure high-quality data. Before it’s provided to the Portal, several transformation and cleaning steps can be applied directly to the source system data. The Knowledge Portal implementation team should collaborate closely with the various data repository teams to ensure the required data fields are standardized, cleaned, and validated before being exported. By working together, these teams can assess the current state of the data, identify missing fields, spot discrepancies, and address inconsistencies.

If the data from source systems still contains imperfections, a few remediation strategies can be applied to prepare it for integration: 

• Removing Placeholder or Dummy Data: If the data source team is unable to remediate placeholder or dummy data, the Portal team can compile a list of these “dummy values” and remove them entirely. Displaying a field as “empty” is preferable to showing a fake or false value.
• Normalizing Terms with a Controlled Vocabulary: In cases where the source system lacks a controlled vocabulary, the Portal team can align certain data fields with the Knowledge Portal’s taxonomy and ontology. This involves using synonyms to match various representations of the same concept into one concise point.
• Enforcing Data Standards through APIs: The Portal team’s APIs can be configured to expect and enforce specific data standards, models, and types, ensuring that only accurately conforming data is ingested and displayed to the end user. Such enforcement can also highlight required fields and alert data teams when essential data is missing, which increases visibility into the underlying issues associated with bad data.

Guillermo emphasized the importance of remedying data issues to build and maintain user trust and buy-in. Effectively addressing bad data is also critical to avoid significant issues:

• Preventing Unauthorized Access to Information: Without proper security measures and clear definitions of user identities and access rights, there’s a high risk of sensitive information being exposed. The data needs to clearly indicate who should be granted access, and users need to be uniquely and consistently identifiable across systems.
• Ensuring Full Functionality of the Knowledge Portal: If data is incomplete or untrustworthy, it impedes the use of advanced capabilities and functionalities of the Knowledge Portal. Reliable data is foundational for seeing its full potential.

Business Meaning and Context

Guillermo Galdamez

As mentioned earlier, Knowledge Portals aggregate information from diverse sources and present it to users, introducing a new capability to the organization. It’s essential for the Knowledge Portal team to fully understand the data and information being presented to the users. This includes knowing its significance and business value, its origin, how it is generated, and its connection to other business processes. Keep in mind that this information is seldom presented to users all at once, so they will likely face a learning curve to utilize the Knowledge Portal effectively. This challenge can be mitigated through thoughtful design, change management, training, and communication. 

Designs for a Knowledge Portal need to strategically organize different information elements. This involves not only prioritizing these elements based on relative importance, but also ensuring they align with business logic and are linked to related data, information, and people. In other words, the design needs to be understandable to all intended users at a single glance. Achieving this requires clear, prioritized use cases tailored to the Knowledge Portal’s audiences, combined with thorough user research that informs user expectations. Knowing this, it becomes easier to design with user needs and objectives in mind and have it more seamlessly fit into their daily workflows and activities. 

Effective change management, training, and communications help reinforce the purpose and the value of a Knowledge Portal, which might not always be intuitive to everyone across the organization; some users may be resistant to change, preferring to stick to familiar routines. It’s crucial for the Knowledge Portal team to understand these users’ motivations, their hesitations, and what they value. Clearly articulating the individual benefits users will gain from the Portal, setting clear expectations, and providing guidance on using the Portal successfully are crucial for new users to adopt it and appreciate its value in their work.

Kate Erfle

It is essential to provide context to the information available on the portal, especially within a specific business or industry setting. This involves adding metadata, descriptions, and categorizations to data, allowing siloed, disconnected information to be associated and helping users discover content relevant to their needs quickly and efficiently. 

A robust metadata system and a well-defined taxonomy can aid in organizing and presenting content in a meaningful way. It’s important to evaluate the current state of existing taxonomies and controlled vocabularies across each source system, as well as to assess the prevalence and consistency of metadata applied to content within these systems. These evaluations help determine the level of effort required to standardize and connect content effectively. To obtain the full benefits of a Knowledge Portal–creating an Enterprise 360 view of the organization’s assets, knowledge, and data–this content needs to be well-defined, categorized, and described.

Security and Governance

Guillermo Galdamez

One of the most common motivations driving the implementation of Knowledge Portals is the user’s need to quickly find specific information required for their work. However, users often overlook the equally important aspect of securing this information. 

Often, information is shared through unsecured channels like email, chat, or other common communication methods at users’ disposal. This approach places the responsibility entirely on the sender to ascertain and decide if a recipient is authorized to receive the information. Sometimes senders mistakenly send information to the wrong person, or they may need additional time to verify the recipient’s access rights. Furthermore, senders may need to redact parts of the information that the recipient isn’t permitted to see, which adds another time-consuming step. 

The Knowledge Portal implementation must address this organizational challenge. At times, the Knowledge Portal team will need to guide the organization in establishing a clear framework for access control. This is especially necessary when the Knowledge Portal creates new types of information and data by aggregating, repackaging, and delivering them to users.

Kate Erfle

Security and governance are paramount in the construction of a Knowledge Portal. They profoundly influence various implementation details and are critical for ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information within the portal.

The first major piece of security and governance is user authentication, which involves verifying a user’s identity. Several options for implementing user authentication include traditional username and password, Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), and Single Sign-On (SSO). These choices will be influenced by the existing authentication and identity management systems in use within the client organization. Solidifying these design decisions early in the architecting process is critical as they affect many facets of the portal’s implementation.

The second major piece of security and governance is user authorization, which involves granting users permission to access specific resources based on their identity, as established through user authentication. Multiple authorization models may be necessary based on the level of fine-grained access control required. Popular models include: 

• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): This model involves defining roles (e.g., admin, user, manager) and assigning specific permissions to each. Users are then assigned to these roles, which determine their access level.
• Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC): In this model, access decisions are based on user attributes (e.g., department, location, job title), with policies that specify the conditions for access.

Depending on the organization’s use case, one or a combination of these may be used to manage user access and ensure sensitive data is secured. The difficulty and complexity of the implementation will be directly correlated with the current and target state of identity and security management across the organization, as well as the breadth and depth of data classification applied to the organization’s data.

Information Seeking and Action

Guillermo Galdamez

Knowledge Portal users will approach their quest for information in a variety of ways. Users may prefer to browse through content during exploratory sessions, or they may leverage search when they know precisely what they need. Often, users employ a combination of these approaches depending on their specific needs for data or content. 

For instance, in a recent Knowledge Portal project, our user research revealed that individuals rarely searched for documents directly. Instead, they searched for various business entities and then browsed through related documents. This prompted the team to reevaluate the prioritization of documents in search results and the necessary data points that should be displayed alongside these documents to provide meaningful context. 

In summary, having a strong user research strategy is essential to understand what type of data and information users are seeking, their reasons for needing it, their subsequent use of it, and how this supports the broader organization’s processes and objectives.

Kate Erfle

Knowledge Portals are designed to provide users with access to a broader range of information and resources than available in the various source systems, and they should facilitate users in both finding necessary information and taking meaningful actions based on that information. 

Information Seeking Involves:

• Search Functionality: A robust search engine matches user queries to the most relevant content. This involves keyword relevance, search and ranking algorithms, and user-specific parameters. Tailoring these parameters to the organization’s specific business use cases improves search accuracy. The incorporation of taxonomies and ontologies for content categorization, tagging, and filtering further refines search results, aligning them with organization-specific terminology, and enables users to sift through results using familiar business vernacular.
• Browsing and Navigation: Well-structured categories, facets, menus, and user-friendly navigation features help users discover not just the information they directly seek, but also related, relevant content they may not have anticipated. This can be done through various interfaces, including mobile applications, enhancing the portal’s accessibility and user interaction.
• Dynamic Content Aggregation and Personalization: A standout feature of Knowledge Portals is their ability to aggregate data from various sources into a single page, which can be highly personalized. For instance, a project aggregator page might include sections on related projects, prioritizing those relevant to the user’s department.

Action Involves:

• Integration with Source Systems or Applications: Providing seamless links to source systems within the Knowledge Portal allows users to easily find content and perform CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations on the original content.
• Task Support: Tools for document generation, data visualization, workflow automation, and more, assist users in their daily tasks and enable them to make the most of source data and optimize business processes.
• Learning and Performance Support: Dynamic content and interactive features encourage users to actively engage with content which strengthens their comprehension and absorption of information. 
• Feedback Mechanism: Enabling users to contribute feedback on content and documents within the portal fosters continuous improvement and enhances the portal’s effectiveness over time.

Closing

The business and technical considerations outlined here are essential for creating a Knowledge Portal that intuitively delivers information to its users. Keep in mind that these considerations are interconnected, and a well-designed Knowledge Portal should strike a balance between them to provide users with a seamless and enriching experience. Should your organization aspire to implement a Knowledge Portal, our team of experts can guide you through these challenges and intricacies, ensuring a successful deployment.

The post Expert Analysis: Top 5 Considerations When Building a Modern Knowledge Portal appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Throughout my career, I have worked with dozens of public and private organizations who want a holistic understanding of their knowledge assets. Organizations seek new ways to manage, find, and take action on their knowledge, whether through a content management system, search tool, or GPT chatbot.

At EK, we’ve identified a common challenge faced by many of our clients: the presence of siloed data sources and dispersed information, which both internal and external users require access to on a daily basis. This observation led us to the idea of Knowledge Portals.

Knowledge Portals are a compelling solution for organizational findability and discoverability.

What is a Knowledge Portal?

EK defines a Knowledge Portal as

the hub to integrate your organization’s KM assets, including your information, data, and people, into a single highly contextualized environment where real business can get done.

This definition touches on the three main differentiators between knowledge portals of the past and today. Knowledge Portals:

• Contain all information from an organization’s domain. An organization’s domain includes the people, content, data, events, webinars, courses, policies, and more.
  
• Contextualize information based on the entire organization’s domain. Bringing together information from disparate data sources lets users get a complete view of how that information ties into an organization’s work.
  
• Understand who users are and what they need. Whether the user is a help desk agent, a sales engineer, or an investment professional, a Knowledge Portal personalizes what that user sees and provides the ability to take necessary actions.

Let’s look at some examples as we break down these three differentiators.

Knowledge Portals Contain All Your Stuff

The Knowledge Portal solution combines an organization’s knowledge, content, data, and people into a single view. Previously, Knowledge Portals surfaced content across repositories and provided links to each system. Now, Knowledge Portals contain experts, company events, projects, previously hosted training videos and webinars, and essential policies. On the Knowledge Cast podcast on Knowledge Portals, my colleague Rebecca Wyatt stated,

“…users need one place to [search] and get the information that they need.
You’ve already failed if they have to decide where to go to execute a search…”

Today’s organizations have a proliferation of systems and information as teams look to solve their own specific use cases. A Knowledge Portal breaks down those information silos and surfaces relevant information to users at query time. Additionally, Knowledge Portals provide the ability to intuitively navigate an organization’s domain. For example, from viewing a project, one can see related experts on that project and then move on to relevant training videos. Curating all of your knowledge assets in one portal enables more intuitive user journeys and more efficient work as users take action on the knowledge they find.

Knowledge Portals Contextualize Information

Knowledge Portals are designed to consolidate the most comprehensive information about a specific “thing” within your organization into a single, accessible location. Sometimes referred to as an entity, a “thing” is a key element in your organization’s domain, such as people, products, communities of practices, or subject areas. These entities are often so ingrained in an organization’s work that they appear across multiple systems. A Knowledge Portal effectively integrates this separate information into a cohesive view, which provides context to users, enabling them to see how these entities interconnect with and contribute to the broader scope of an organization’s work.

As we introduce Knowledge Portals to clients, a common question arises regarding how they differ from Enterprise Search. Indeed, there are notable similarities between the two. Both Knowledge Portals and Enterprise Search:

• Allow users to search across multiple systems,
• Enable users to explore various types of information, such as people and documents, and
• Provide dashboards or pages that aggregate and display results centered around specific topics.

However, despite these similarities, the unique functionalities of Knowledge Portals set them apart in significant ways, which we’ll explore in further detail.

Enterprise Search is a major component of a Knowledge Portal. The core differentiator of a Knowledge Portal is its ability to establish relationships between information across various systems and to identify the elements that comprise an entity. Consider this scenario: when you search for a company project using an Enterprise Search tool, you receive a list of individual items (such as people, documents, and projects) related to or mentioning that project. In contrast, a Knowledge Portal takes you directly to a comprehensive project page. This page not only describes the project but also details the team members, client contacts, project deliverables, and offers direct links to the profiles of each person, client, or other relevant entities associated with that project. That’s the key feature. Knowledge Portals connect your organization’s entities so that users can get away from a simple set of results and intuitively access and understand the information they need.

Knowledge Portals Personalize and Enable

In the process of assembling and contextualizing information, knowledge portals tailor the content and information displayed for each individual user. A crucial part of a knowledge portal is the underlying graph that maps out the relationships between the organization’s entities. This graph, based on shared characteristics and previously obscured connections, enables us to connect users to other organizational entities in that graph. For example, if the graph includes a user’s job role, the portal can then tailor the display of upcoming events or courses on the homepage or within search pages to suit that role. Similarly, if the graph includes information about a user’s department, we can boost search results related to projects or deliverables from the same department.

Additionally, by considering a user’s role, we can provide targeted actions along with the information provided. For instance, project managers viewing employee profiles could benefit from an “add to team” button when identifying subject matter experts. Similarly, customers browsing a product-focused knowledge portal could have access to a “talk to an agent” option, whereas support agents would see solution guides to assist them in walking customers through various issues. This level of personalization, combined with action-oriented opportunities empowers users to take action quickly and successfully.

We encourage scheduling a few workshops focused on action-oriented search and knowledge graph design to better understand what users would find most beneficial as they interact with the Knowledge Portal. The potential for personalization, along with the ability to deliver targeted messages and actions are endless. 

Conclusion

Knowledge Portals have become increasingly critical for organizations in the face of growing user information demands and the rapid expansion of knowledge. If you’re interested in learning more about Knowledge Portals and their successful implementation, I recommend some insightful blogs and case studies authored by my colleagues:

• Five Lessons in Developing and Deploying a Modern Knowledge Portal
• Knowledge Portals Revisited
• Knowledge Portal Architecture Explained
• Knowledge Portal for a Global Investment Firm

If you want to collaborate on the development of your organization’s Knowledge Portal, or if there’s a specific topic you’d like us to explore in future discussions, don’t hesitate to contact us!

The post Breaking it down: What is a Knowledge Portal? appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

The Solution

Assessing Current Content and Asset Capabilities at Scale

EK commenced its engagement by comprehensively assessing the company’s current content and asset capabilities. This deep dive included a data mapping and augmented corpus analysis effort into the content and technologies that power their website, such as Adobe AEM (marketing content), a Learning Management System (LMS) with product-related educational content, a Product Information Management (PIM) solution with over 70,000 products, and Salesforce for storing customer data. This provided a clear picture of the existing content and data landscape.

A Semantic Data Model 

With a deeper understanding of the content’s diversity and the need for efficient classification, EK defined and implemented a robust taxonomy and ontology system. This provided a structured way to classify and relate content, making it more discoverable and actionable for users. To tangibly demonstrate the potential of knowledge graphs, EK implemented a POC. This POC aimed to bridge the silos between the different systems, allowing for a more unified and cohesive content experience that connected product and marketing information.

Integrated Data Resources and Knowledge Graph Embeddings

EK utilized an integrated data set to counter data fragmentation across different platforms. A more cohesive content resource was built by combining Adobe AEM and LMS data with manually curated data and extracted information from the rendered website. However, the critical leap came when the entire knowledge graph, which encapsulated this unified data set, was loaded into memory. This in-memory knowledge graph paved the way for real-time processing and analysis, which is essential for generating meaningful embeddings.

Similarity Index and Link Classifier: Two-Fold Search Enhancement

• Similarity Index: EK’s Enterprise AI and Search experts worked together to convert the in-memory knowledge graph into vector embeddings. These embeddings, teeming with intricate data relationships, were harnessed to power a similarity index; this index stands as a testament to AI’s potential, offering content recommendations rooted in contextual relevance and similarity metrics.
• Link Classifier: Building upon the embeddings, EK introduced a machine learning (ML) classifier. This tool was meticulously trained to discern patterns and relationships within the embeddings, establishing connections between products and content. Consequently, the system was endowed with the capability to recommend content corresponding to a user’s engagement with a product or related content. This transformed the user journey, enriching it with timely and pertinent content suggestions.

ML-Infused User Experience Enhancement

Venturing beyond conventional methodologies, EK incorporated ML, knowledge graphs, taxonomy, and ontology to redefine the user experience. This allowed users to navigate and discover important content through an ML-powered content discovery system, yielding suggestions that resonated with their needs and browsing history.

Unified Platform Management via Predictive Insights

Addressing the multifaceted challenge of various teams steering different platforms, EK integrated the machine learning classifier with predictive insights. This fusion empowered teams with the foresight to gauge user preferences, allowing them to align platform features and fostering a cohesive and forward-looking digital landscape.

Search Dashboard Displaying ML-based Results

Concluding their engagement, EK presented with a search dashboard. This dashboard, designed to exhibit two distinct types of results – similarity index and link classifier – served as a window for the organization to witness and evaluate the dual functionalities. The underlying intent was to grant their e-commerce website backend avenues to elevate their search capabilities, giving them a comparative view of multiple ML-based systems.

The EK Difference

EK’s hallmark is rooted in the proficiency of advanced AI and knowledge graph technologies, as well as our profound commitment to client relationships. Working closely with the company’s content and data teams, EK displayed a robust understanding of the technological necessities and the organizational dynamics at play. Even when the level of effort and need from the solution extended beyond the initial scope of work, EK’s flexible approach allowed for open dialogue and iterative development and value demonstration. This ensured that the project’s progression aligned closely with the evolving needs of our client.

Recognizing the intricacy of the project and the importance of a well-documented process, EK meticulously enhanced the documentation of both the delivery process and development. This created transparency and ensured that all the resources needed to carry forward, modify, or scale the implemented solution are in place for the future.

Moreover, given the complexity and nuances involved in such large-scale implementations, EK provided a repeatable framework to validate AI results with stakeholders and maintain integrity and explainability of solutions with human-in-the-loop development throughout the engagement. This was achieved through iterative sessions, ensuring the final system met technical benchmarks and resonated with the company’s organizational context and language.

The Results

The engagement equipped the organization with a state-of-the-art, context-based recommendation system specifically tailored for their vast and diverse digital ecosystem. This solution drastically improved content discoverability, relevance, and alignment, fundamentally enhancing the user experience on their product website.

The exploratory nature of the project further unveiled opportunities for additional  enhancements, particularly in refining the data, optimizing the system and exposing areas where the firm had gaps in content creation or educational materials as it relates to products. Other notable results include:

• Automated framework to standardized metadata across systems for over 70,000 product categories;
• A Proof of Concept (POC) that bridged content silos across 4+ different systems, demonstrating the potential of knowledge graphs;
• A machine-learning classifier that expedited content aggregation and metadata application process through automation; and
• Increased user retention and better product discovery, leading to 6 figures in closed revenue.

Download Flyer

The post Recommendation Engine Automatically Connecting Learning Content & Product Data appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

The Solution

EK designed, developed, and deployed an Enterprise Knowledge Portal, leveraging a suite of best-of-breed technologies. EK first conducted business case refinement sessions to understand, in-depth, the problems that the Knowledge Portal needed to solve and its benefits to the firm, defining a series of personas, use cases, and user journeys to help prioritize key features along an Agile development plan. EK then developed the Agile roadmap for an MVP solution that would offer immediate value to the firm’s staff and business ventures while proving the value of the Knowledge Portal, as well as the follow-on backlog of features for an enhanced solution that added to the value of the foundation model to be delivered iteratively. 

Over the next year, EK worked side by side with the client’s business and IT groups, as well as other third-party vendors, in order to iteratively develop and test the solution. The MVP was delivered on time, and EK is now continuing development of the system, adding additional features and back-end sources in order to enrich the overall wealth of knowledge, information, and data within the system.

Overall, the Knowledge Portal delivers several first-of-its-kind features for the organization, including:

• Integration of structured and unstructured data, not just as links but as displayed results that merge source materials for easy comprehension, analysis, and user action;
• Ability to understand and align complex security models, displaying only that content that should be accessible to each individual;
• Machine Learning and AI to provide highly customized views, automatically assembled based on the user; and
• Integration of all types of information with people, enabling individuals to find experts across the enterprise in a way that forms new connections and identifies new opportunities for collaboration.

Of specific note, the portal’s search application leverages a graph database modeled to integrate information from an extensive network of internal data sources for delivery in a single search result. For example, a single investment might combine information from as many as 12 different systems. In addition to the graph database, the portal leverages an insights engine powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) that unifies siloed data and detects trends across repositories. The graph database and insights engine alike are powered by a semantic layer that maintains the relationships that users could take advantage of to traverse data sets existing across the enterprise, enhancing relevant content findability regardless of a user’s business role. Additionally, EK mapped user roles to access and permissions to refine the firm’s access controls, streamlining navigation of the firm’s data, thereby reducing reliance on staff to determine levels of access and increasing the efficiency of knowledge discovery.  

In support of the advanced technology and ongoing system enhancement, EK also focused on several key foundational KM topics to ensure the long-term success and adoption of the Knowledge Portal. These included content governance and a wide-ranging content cleanup, migration, and enhancement effort, taxonomy and ontology design accompanied by a tagging strategy, change and communications, and content type design. These activities and deliverables ensured that the content and data integrated within the Knowledge Portal could be trusted, was easily consumable both by humans and machines, and would be maintained and further improved moving forward. Furthermore, the accompanying communications and education plan delivered an engaged and aware user base, ready to get value from the new tool.

The EK Difference

EK delivered every aspect of the Knowledge Portal solution using its own staff, deployed across three continents in order to support the client’s global needs. EK brought a broad range of internal experts to bear for this initiative, including knowledge management experts, software engineers, solution architects, change and organizational design experts, taxonomists, ontologists, content strategists, and UI/UX designers and developers. This unique assortment of experts collaborated on every element of the initiative to ensure it leveraged EK’s advanced methodologies and best practices and that the business stakeholders were engaged, aligned, and supportive of the new system.

This effort was also run leveraging true Agile principles to reduce risk and optimize stakeholder engagement and comprehension of the complex initiative. EK’s team of consultants and engineers expertly applied Agile to quickly adapt to unforeseen changes and roadblocks in development. As a result, rather than talking about the Knowledge Portal, we were able to show early prototypes, spawning a wealth of end-user understanding and feedback from the first months of the project.

The Results

The Knowledge Portal consolidated the firm’s vast intellectual resources in a single searchable space, arming investment professionals with easy access to valuable information and connections to experienced staff in ways that had never before been possible. EK is continuing to iterate to add additional features and sources, but the results are already being felt by the organization. Key performance indicators and milestones to date include:

• Strong adoption, with overall user counts increasing and extremely high retention of all users.
• Less time spent looking for information or recreating organizational knowledge, resulting in overall higher productivity and employee satisfaction.
• Faster upskilling of new hires and junior staff, with more junior staffers reporting an ability to complete tasks without waiting for guidance from others.
• Less redundant acquisitions of external research and data sets.

With additional iterations of the Knowledge Portal planned for release over the next two years, the organization continues to partner with EK and invest in the tool as a transformative solution for the organization.

Download Flyer

The post Knowledge Portal for a Global Investment Firm appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

As CEO of the world’s largest Knowledge Management consulting company, I am fortunate to possess a unique view of KM trends. For each of the last several years, I’ve written an annual list of these KM trends, and looking back, I’m pleased to have (mostly) been on point, having successfully identified such KM trends as Knowledge Graphs, the confluence of KM and Learning, the increasing focus on KM Return on Investment (ROI), and the use of KM as the foundation for Artificial Intelligence.

Every year in order to develop this list, I engage EK’s KM consultants and thought leaders to help me identify what trends merit inclusion. We consider factors including themes in requests for proposals and requests for information; the strategic plans and budgets of global organizations; priorities for KM transformations; internal organizational surveys; interviews with KM practitioners, organizational executives, and business stakeholders; themes from the world’s KM conferences and publications, interviews with fellow KM consultancies and KM software leaders; and the product roadmaps for leading KM technology vendors.

The following are the seven KM trends for 2023:

KM at a Crossroads – The last several years have seen a great deal of attention and funding for KM initiatives. Both the pandemic and great resignation caused executives to realize their historical lack of focus on KM resulted in knowledge loss, unhappy employees, and an inability to efficiently upskill new hires. At the same time, knowledge graphs matured to the point where KM systems could offer further customization and ability to integrate multiple types of content from disparate systems more easily.

In 2023, much of the world is bracing for a recession, with the United States and Europe likely to experience a major hit. Large organizations have been preparing for this already, with many proactively reducing their workforce and cutting costs. Historically, organizations have drastically reduced KM programs, or even cut them out entirely, during times of economic stress. In 2008-2009, for instance, organizational KM spending was gutted, and many in-house KM practitioners were laid off.

I anticipate many organizations will do the same this year, but far fewer than in past recessions. The organizations that learned their lessons from the pandemic and staffing shortages will continue to invest in KM, recognizing the critical business value offered. KM programs are much more visible and business critical than they were a decade ago, thanks to maturation in KM practices and technologies. Knowledge Management programs can deliver business resiliency and competitive advantage, ensure that knowledge is retained in the organization, and enable employee and customer satisfaction and resulting retention. The executives that recognize this will continue their investments in KM, perhaps scaled down or more tightly managed, but continued nonetheless. 

Less mature organizations, on the other hand, will repeat the same mistakes of the past, cutting KM, and with it, walking knowledge out the door, stifling innovation, and compounding retention issues, all for minimal and short-term savings. This KM trend, put simply, will be the divergence between organizations that compound their existing issues by cutting KM programs and those that keep calm and KM on.

Focus on Business Value and ROI – Keying off the previous trend, and revisiting a trend I’ve identified in past years, 2023 will bring a major need to quantify the value of KM. In growth years when economies are booming, we’ve typically seen a greater willingness for organizations to invest in KM efforts. This year, there will be a strong demand to prove the business value of KM. 

For KM practitioners, this means being able to measure business outcomes instead of just KM outcomes. Examples of KM outcomes are improved findability and discoverability of content, increased use and reuse of information, decreased knowledge loss, and improved organizational awareness and alignment. All of these things are valuable, as no CEO would say they don’t want them for their organization, and yet none of them are easily quantifiable and measurable in terms of ROI. Business outcomes, on the other hand, can be tied to meaningful and measurable savings, decreased costs, or improved revenues. Business outcomes resulting from KM transformations can include decreased storage and software license costs, improved employee and customer retention, faster and more effective employee upskilling, and improved sales and delivery. The KM programs that communicate value in terms of these and other business outcomes will be those that thrive this year.

This KM trend is a good one for the industry, as it will require that we put the benefits to the organization and end users at the center of any decision.

Knowledge Portals – Much to the surprise, if not disbelief, of many last year, I predicted that portals would make a comeback from their heyday in the early 2000’s. The past year validated this prediction, with more organizations making multi-year and multi-million dollar investments in KM transformations with a Knowledge Portal (or KM Portal) at the center of the effort. As I wrote about recently, both the critical awareness of KM practices as well as the technology necessary to make a Knowledge Portal work have come a long way in the last twenty years. Steered further by the aforementioned drivers of remote work and the great resignation, organizations are now implementing Knowledge Portals at the enterprise level. 

The use cases for Knowledge Portals vary, with some treating the system as an intranet or knowledge base, others using it as a hub for learning or sales, and still others using it more for tacit knowledge capture and collaboration. Regardless of the use cases, what makes these Knowledge Portals really work is the usage of Knowledge Graphs. Knowledge Graphs can link information assets from multiple applications and display them on a single screen without complicated and inflexible interface development. CIOs now have a way to do context-driven integration, and business units can now see all of the key information about their most critical assets in a single location. What this means is that Knowledge Portals can now solve the problem of application information silos, enabling an organization to collectively understand everything its people need to know about its most important knowledge assets.

Context-Driven KM – We’ve all heard the phrase, “Content is King,” but in today’s KM systems, Context is the new reigning monarch. The new trend in advanced knowledge systems is for them to be built not just around information architecture and content quality, but around knowledge graphs that provide a knowledge map of the organization. A business model and knowledge map expressed as an ontology delivers a flexible, expandable means of relating all of an organization’s knowledge assets, in context, and revealing them to users in a highly intuitive, customized manner. Put simply, this means that any given user can find what they’re looking for and discover that which they didn’t even know existed in ways that feel natural. Our own minds work in the same way as this technology, relating different memories, experiences, and thoughts. A system that can deliver on this same approach means an organization can finally harness the full breadth of information they possess across all of their locations, systems, and people for the purposes of collaboration, learning, efficiency, and discovery. Essentially, it’s what everyone has always wanted out of their information systems, and now it’s a reality.

Data Firmly in KM – Historically, most organizations have drawn a hard line between unstructured and structured information, managing them under different groups, in different systems, with different rules and governance structures. As the thinking around KM continues to expand, and KM systems continue to mature, this dichotomy will increasingly be a thing of the past. The most mature organizations today are looking at any piece of information, structured or unstructured, physical or digital, as a knowledge asset that can be connected and contextualized like any other. This includes people and their expertise, products, places, and projects. The broadening spectrum of KM is being driven by knowledge graphs and their expanding use cases, but it also means that topics like data governance, metadata hubs, data fabric, data mesh, data science, and artificial intelligence are entering the KM conversation. In short, the days of arguing that an organization’s data is outside the realm of a KM transformation are over.

Push Over Pull – When considering KM systems and technology, the vast majority of the discussion has centered around findability and discoverability. We’ve often talked about KM systems making it easier for the right people to find the information they need to do their jobs. As KM technologies mature, the way we think about connecting people and the knowledge they need is shifting. Rather than just asking, “How can we enable people to find the right information?”, we can also think more seriously about how we proactively deliver the right information to those people. This concept is not new, but the ability to deliver on it is increasingly real and powerful.

When we combine an understanding of all of our content in context, with an understanding of our people and analytics to inform us how people are interacting with that content and what content is new or changing, we’re able to begin predictively delivering content to the right people. Sometimes, this is relatively basic, providing the classic “users who looked at this product also looked at…” functionality by matching metadata and/or user types, but increasingly it can leverage graphs and analytics to recognize when a piece of content has changed or a new piece of content of a particular type or topic has been created, triggering a push to the people the system predicts could use that information or may wish to be aware of it. Consider a user who last year leveraged twelve pieces of content to research a report they authored and published. An intelligent system can recognize the author should be notified if one of the twelve pieces of source content has changed, potentially suggesting to the content author they should revisit their report and update it.

Overall, the trend we’re seeing here is about Intelligent Delivery of content and leveraging AI, Machine Learning, and Advanced Content Analytics in order to deliver the right content to individuals based on what we know and can infer about them. We’re seeing this much more as a prioritized goal within organizations but also as a feature software vendors are seeking to include in their products.

Personalized KM – With all the talk of improved technology, delivery, and context, the last trend is more of a summary of trends. KM, and KM systems, are increasingly customized to the individual being asked to share, create, or find/leverage content. Different users have different missions, with some more consumers of knowledge within an organization and others more creators or suppliers of that knowledge. Advanced KM processes and systems will recognize a user’s responsibility and mandates and will enable them to perform and deliver in the most intuitive and seamless way possible. 

This trend has a lot to do with content assembly and flexible content delivery. It means that, with the right knowledge about the user, today’s KM solutions can assemble only that information that pertains to the user, removing all of the detritus that surrounds it. For instance, an employee doesn’t need to wade through hundreds of pages of an employee handbook that aren’t pertinent to them; instead, they should receive an automatically generated version specifically for their location, role, and benefits.

The customized KM trend isn’t just about consuming information, however. More powerfully, it is also about driving knowledge sharing behaviors. For example, any good project manager should capture lessons learned at the end of a project, yet we often see organizations fail to get their PMs to do this consistently. A well-designed KM system will recognize an individual as a PM, understand the context of the projects they are managing, and be able to leverage data to know when that project is completed, thereby prompting the user with a specific lessons learned template at the appropriate time to capture that new set of information as content. That is customized KM. It becomes part of the natural work and operations of systems, and it makes it easier for a user to “do the right thing” because the processes and systems are engineered specifically to the roles and responsibilities of the individual.

Another way of thinking about these trends is by invoking the phrase “KM at the Point of Need,” derived from a phrase popularized in the learning space (Learning at the Point of Need). We’re seeing KM head toward delivering highly contextualized experiences and knowledge to the individual user at the time and in the way they need it and want it. What this means is that KM becomes more natural, more simply the way that business is done rather than a conscious or deliberate act of “doing KM.” This is exciting for the field, and it represents true business value and transformation.

Do you need help understanding and harnessing the value of these trends? Contact us to learn more and get started.

The post Knowledge Management Trends in 2023 appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.