We’re in an exciting position to experience continued growth during a time where other organizations are pulling back. Though there are many factors that go into this, I’ll sum it up with the two most significant. First, EK continues to be filled with some of the smartest, most conscientious, and most creative people I’ve ever worked with. This team of truly special people drives our growth and value to our clients, and is my personal primary motivation every day. Secondly, as a company, we’ve always chosen to look beyond the current trends and consider what our clients truly need to support their business. Over the years, this has pushed us to be early adopters and thought leaders in agile KM, knowledge graphs, content assembly, ontology management, and data catalogs, amongst many others, leading to better, more forward-looking solutions for our clients and continued growth for EK.

I’ll use EK’s six guiding principles to further discuss our year.

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 I mentioned in my introduction, we are where we are in large part due to our team. We’ve done our best to always honor this principle above all others, and our team has rewarded us for that with amazing results and spirit. This year we began welcoming employees back to the office on an optional basis and I was thrilled to see people choosing to come back, and feel the energy and collaboration return to the office. Though we will be a hybrid organization moving forward, it was exciting to see people choose to return to the office and leverage that time to make stronger connections and learn from one another. This collaboration will help fuel the next round of EK innovations we bring to our clients.

We continued to grow our staff this year, adding new team members at all levels. Given our growth and forecasts for 2023, we’ve got more work to do there, including our existing openings. We also continued our investment in our team, successfully rolling out our year-long onboarding process called Kamp EK, which includes a mix of formal and informal learning, both live and asynchronous, arrayed over a year with measurable success criteria at each stage in the process. I’m personally enjoying teaching the “Why KM Matters,” and “Introduction to Consulting” modules. We also continued our standing professional learning benefit, where each employee received a guaranteed $3,000 to apply to their development in a way they choose. This year we had one of the highest rates of usage for this benefit, reflected in the fact that twenty team members earned promotions over the course of the year as well.

We added several new successful programs this year to supplement our benefits and reinforce the importance of lifelong learning and work. The first, ‘EK Balance,’ is about health and wellness, as well as overall work life balance. Events have included pop-up juice bars in the office, recurring yoga classes, and massage days. We’ve also been running monthly challenges, including a steps challenge in the fall and a hydration challenge this winter. Participation in these activities has been strong, and we’ve made donations to various charitable organizations (amongst more material prizes) for each participant.

‘EK Grow’ is about career development and lifelong learning. It supplements our $3,000 per year professional learning benefit and adds an additional $1,000 per year for any other type of learning an employee may choose. Thus far, employees have used this for cooking classes, wilderness rescue, woodworking, piano lessons, and language lessons, to name just a few. EK Grow also includes “Pitches and Pints,” where team members can sign up to do dinner and drinks with the leadership team and practice delivering the company pitch deck. This has been a wonderful opportunity to get to know team members in small groups and also provide coaching on public speaking and effective presentation in a fun setting. 

Though we started the year fully remote and were hybrid throughout, we found some wonderful opportunities to celebrate together, including our first live Gala since before Covid, our annual Holiday Potluck and Purple Elephant, as well as several other great team building opportunities (including movie nights, a summer Pirate Ship cruise, and painting lessons. 

Now for the fifth time, Inc. Magazine listed us amongst their best workplaces. This recognition continues to mean a great deal since it is a national competition, but moreover because it is driven by an anonymous survey of employees. You will read below of the many new wins we received this year, but the recognition driven by our own employees, to me, continues to be one of the best each year. This gives us a great sense that, though there will always be more to do, we continue to head in the right direction. 

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.

This year, we broke our past record and published a total of 93 new thought leadership pieces in our knowledge base, meaning we now have nearly 500 total pieces of thought leadership, free and open to the community. The knowledge base includes blogs, white papers, case studies, slide presentations, videos, and podcast episodes. Our podcast, Knowledge Cast, was named the number one KM podcast for the second year in a row, and this year we recorded a live episode of Knowledge Cast as the closing keynote at KMWorld. Speaking of KMWorld, we broke another record there, this year delivering twelve separate presentations, including client case studies alongside our clients at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, U.S. Department of State, and Walmart, amongst others. A highpoint of the year was being recognized at the conference alongside Walmart as the 2022 KM Reality Award Winner for the work we’ve done with them.

Another major thought leadership highpoint was the publication of ‘Making Knowledge Management Clickable,” the book I coauthored with EK’s COO Joe Hilger. Published by Springer, the book bridges the gap between knowledge management and technology and details the complete lifecycle of knowledge, information, and data from how knowledge flows through an organization to how end users want to handle it and experience it. In short, it is EK’s total experience rolled into 318 pages of very small print. 

Between the knowledge base, conference speaking, podcast, and book, we were proud to receive additional 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 eighth year in a row, as well as one of the 50 Companies leveraging AI to drive Knowledge Management 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.

When we talk about transparency we are referring to openness through all channels, between leadership and staff at EK, between us and our clients, and between each other as colleagues and teams. The last couple of years of Covid have been a major learning lesson for us. Communications that were easy in the office became much harder digitally. Even with our hybrid return to the office, we’ve learned from that experience and are working more to improve all forms of communication.

One of the primary company-wide communication techniques we use is 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. We also use this time to discuss any potential issues or challenges. 

This past year, one moment of transparent communication stands out for me. We were notified by one of our clients that their executives were insourcing all consulting services due to poor financial projections and, out of their control, our work with them would unexpectedly end. This was not a crisis for EK, as we are incredibly well-diversified, but it was nonetheless bad news. The news would unexpectedly move several people to “the bench” and represented a significant future revenue loss for us. I immediately sent out an all-company email on this and we opened the topic for questions and conversations at the next knowledge share. We managed the transition gracefully and came out of it a better company for it, demonstrating the openness and trusted dialogue for which we strive.

Since we also were able to return to a live Gala this year, we had that opportunity to celebrate important achievements and milestones, including our annual CEO and COO awards and the “Jacketing” of employees that have completed a three-year tenure at EK. Each new employee, every birthday, and every promotion are also communicated and celebrated company-wide. These celebrations aren’t just about the what, but about the why, covering the impact we can have for our client partners, for our community, and for each other.

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. We wanted to express our vision to be true consultative partners and trusted advisors to our clients, rather than generic order takers. We’ve fulfilled this promise every year of EK’s history, and 2022 was no different. 

In large part due to newly won long-term contracts and long-term partners that have renewed with us, EK will begin 2023 with the largest backlog of contracts and projects in our history. Notably, many of these projects with long-term clients have grown from prototypes, pilots, or group-based initiatives to enterprise level transformations. We’ve helped our clients position and develop these projects for global support, and we’re proud to continue the journey with them and support these hugely impactful programs. We also continue to see our clients come back to us year after year. Small projects have transitioned to large, but moreover, past clients from initial engagements continue to re-engage with us in new and larger ways. Even the aforementioned client that was forced to close our contract due to the economy worked with their leadership to identify an exception enabling us to return in 2023. This is what true EK-client partnerships look like!

One of the greatest results of EK’s client partnerships, growth, and overall success is what we’re able to do with it. Every year since our creation, we’ve actively engaged with our community, both in volunteering our time and in providing financial support to our philanthropic partners. One of the largest and most long-standing of these is with Wolf Trap Center for the Performing Arts, which delivers early arts and music education to schools in need. To date, EK has donated over $90,000 to this incredibly impactful organization, meaning  thousands of children have received access to arts and music education in their early and most critical years of development.

We’ve also created our own No Shave November tradition, which we’ve dubbed ‘Know Shave Knowvember,” of course. In our version, all EK’ers are invited to participate in the way that they choose, either by growing out their beards for the month, or by choosing another activity. This year, some non-beard-growing choices were letter writing, giving up screens outside of work, and volunteering extra time. For every participant, EK donated $200 to the charity of their choice. This year, EK donated over $4,000 in total with recipients including American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Wounded Warrior Project, Girls Who Code, National Alliance on Mental Illness, and World Central Kitchen, amongst many other. It was a joy for me not just to have EK support these wonderful causes, but to see all of the diverse choices of organizations the team selected. 

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.

Integration has a few meanings at EK. For one, our definition of KM means that we’re helping our customers enhance and integrate all of their knowledge objects, including structured and unstructured information, people, products, and other concepts. It also means that we help organizations integrate their disparate systems, processes, and groups to function more cohesively. Finally, it means that we seek to integrate our own services and bring together the individual talents of our diverse staff to deliver the greatest results for our customers.

Where we find the greatest success is when these separate services combine to form comprehensive solutions. This year, we’ve seen a great trend of organizations hiring us to build Knowledge Portals, Intelligent Learning Systems, and Content Assembly Tools, each of which leverage the power of knowledge graphs alongside an organization’s content and data to drive customized and integrated solutions. These are business critical, transformative tools that for many organizations are helping them rapidly adjust to remote or hybrid work environments. 

Just in the course of the last two months, in fact, we’ve won a major multi-year framework agreement with a European banking organization, a multi-year multi-million dollar contract with DAU, and the USALearning contract, with a potential ceiling of $1.76 Billion. This same period has seen an uptick in commercial wins, with a common thread between all of them; each are seeking EK not for a single service, but for an integrated collection of our Knowledge Management, Learning, and Advanced Technology services. 

Our ability to deliver truly integrated services and solve real business challenges for our customers, typically resulting in measurable return on investment, has helped us to grow and perform again this year. In fact, this year we hit a major milestone, being named to the Inc. 5000 fastest growing companies in the U.S. for the fifth year in a row! 

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

With growth on the horizon and new team members joining us with their spirit for collaboration and innovation, I am incredibly excited about the year to come. As has been a theme of this review, we are a company that celebrates our successes and our people, and I anticipate a lot of energy and many celebrations in the year to come.

One of the other ways we sought to better express our energy is through a major company rebrand that took place over the course of the year. We shifted our colors and associated iconography, in fact, to express that energy in all of our materials.

I anticipate 2023 will be a year of more time together, more opportunities to work alongside our wonderful clients, and trusted partners, and more time infusing our energy into our work and our community. This year, we’ll be celebrating our ten-year anniversary as a company and I imagine we’ll do it in style.

On behalf of Enterprise Knowledge and the EK Group, I thank you for your partnership, and wish you a wonderful 2023!

The post EK’s Year in Review – 2022 appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

On Wednesday the 27th, EK’s Holly Maykow, Senior Data Specialist, and Fernando Aguilar, Senior Data Scientist, will deliver a presentation titled Customer 360 and its Applications, a Case Study. This presentation will discuss a case study on how an identity graph represents a comprehensive view of a consumer, giving a global company a 360-degree view of their customers, attributes, and key business insights. Key topics of the talk will include how to define a customer identity graph as well as the requirements for building one. Common challenges and roadblocks to consider before and during identity graph implementation will also be explored.

Also on Wednesday, Joe Hilger, EK COO, will serve as a panelist on the closing presentation of the conference, Delivering and Scaling Knowledge Graph Solutions. Joe will be joined by Robert Engels, VP CTO Europe I&D at Capgemini, Carlos Alberto, Data Protection Officer at Fujitsu, and Vassil Momtchev, CTO of Ontotext. The panelists will cover topics including real world knowledge graph use cases, deployment patterns, and technology ecosystems for graph databases. The session will be moderated by Juan Sequeda of data.world as a special edition of the Catalog and Cocktails podcast.

The virtual conference will provide opportunities to connect with fellow professionals and entrepreneurs, learn from experts across two main tracks, and get an overview of the market and technology trends from industry leaders.

Learn more and register for the forum here.

The post EK Sponsoring and Speaking at Ontotext Knowledge Graph Forum appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Information Foraging

When developing search for a website or intranet, getting to know your end-users and their behavioral tendencies is critical in order to improve the relevancy of search results. Being able to predict how users interact with the site allows developers to design for easy navigation and intuitive search processes. An increasingly popular theme comes into play here and has to do with how users search for information on the web: it’s called Information Foraging, and it has created a new characteristic of content – Information Scent. These concepts are quickly emerging as elements of search experiences that can make or break the search process for users.

Information Foraging is a concept based on the Optimal Foraging Theory (OFT), which analyzes how animals hunt for their food in the wild. The theory suggests that animals make calculated decisions on whether or not to pursue prey based on the amount of energy they will expend in the hunt vs. how much energy they will receive from the meal. Ed H Chi, working with Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card, noticed similarities between the animal behavior analyzed in the development of the OFT and human user behavior when searching for information online. As a result, they came up with the Information Foraging theory, a theory that aims to understand how humans search for information on the web based on several factors.

One of these factors, and arguably the most important factor, is Information Scent. Much like animals follow the scent of prey in their quest for food, users follow a similar “scent” to find the knowledge and information that they need. Information Scent comes in many different forms; some are obvious, such as pictures, related content, and link descriptions. Other forms of Information Scent are more elusive; they may exist as aesthetic design, or affect a user’s subconscious without him/her knowing. The way these different types of Information Scents are depicted and arranged on a website is paramount for creating an effective and efficient enterprise search process. This blog will identify examples of Information Scent and how they can directly affect user behavior when searching for content. Familiarizing yourself with these concepts will not only help you to understand what your users are looking for, but it will also assist in the creation of a user-centric design as it pertains to searching for and finding information.

Content Titles

The title of a search result is arguably the easiest and most reliable way for users to predict what they will encounter when selecting a search result. As such, these titles need to have high Information Scent so that users are not misguided by inaccurate labeling. Typically, the title of a search result is the name of the piece of content, as shown in the image below. In this example,  a user sees only a few search results after entering the query “cookie recipe.” These titles have a low Information Scent because they do not make obvious what the result is about, relying solely on a non-descriptive title to inform the user. Is this a recipe? A scrapbook? What kind of cookies are you telling me how to make? What the heck is on page 112 and page 137? These are the types of questions that result from a lack of Information Scent and, therefore, create a poor search experience.

Description

A common feature incorporated within search tools is a description of the result, usually appearing underneath the title of the search result itself. This description can incorporate hit highlighting – where instances of the search criteria appear in the result, in a general summary of the result, or in a combination of the two. This type of text adds to the potency of the scent given off by the result, as it enables users to view a brief snapshot of what content the target page will offer. The accompanying image below shows a search result containing a description with a high Information Scent, as it provides a succinct summary of what you will find in the article without having to click to find out.

Date Fields

Ask yourself this: “How many times have you clicked on an article, only to find out it was posted 5 years ago and therefore not relevant?” Although it may not be obvious, the date on which a piece of content was created or updated has a significant impact on how users will view the content. These are also common metadata tags that are exposed through search, adding the ability for users to facet their search based on Date Created, Date Modified, etc. In a world where everything is constantly changing around us, so is the content we interact with on a daily basis. As such, users will tend to navigate to the most recently posted content, as it likely contains the most up to date information. Because of this, the Created Date or Updated Date is often something that is included with a search result because it has a high Information Scent. This addition is hardly hackneyed; rather something that is expected and increasingly helpful in the search for relevant information.

Implementing High Information Scent

The question now becomes: “How do I ensure that I am providing my end users with an adequate Information Scent so that they can intuitively find the information that they’re looking for?” One thing that can be done to accomplish this is to identify which aspects of the information surfaced through your search tool have a strong Information Scent and then present those aspects in a consistent manner. This also addresses the need for effective tools to generate and maintain this metadata, so that it can be presented at the time of search. A successful search tool is almost always accompanied by an Enterprise Taxonomy, which helps to create and manage metadata, thus augmenting the search tool as a result. Other accompanying solutions help to enhance search as well, such as an Enterprise Knowledge Graph.

The concept of information scent and how it can help users to intuitively find information on a website should be the main focus of every UI/UX developer when it comes to creating their enterprise search interface. Placing the proper attributes of content in the right places can make or break the users’ experience. Assessing your company’s search solution and learning how to improve it is essential to having satisfied users, and this can be done through attending this workshop.

Does your company need help making information readily available to your users? Let us help! EK specializes in content strategy design and implementation, as well as the design and implementation of enabling technology solutions such as Knowledge Graphs, Taxonomy Management Solutions, and customized search enhancements. Email info@enterprise-knowledge.com with any questions about how we can help you.

The post What is Information Scent, and How do I Design for It? appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

“One of EK’s guiding principles is thought leadership. We’re dedicated to sharing what we’ve learned through our years of KM consulting experience,” remarked EK CEO Zach Wahl. “I’m pleased to once again have EK playing a very prominent role at KMWorld, demonstrative of our status as the largest dedicated Knowledge Management consulting firm in the world.”

EK has been recognized by KMWorld for the last six years as one of the 100 Companies that Matter in KM. One of the reasons for this recognition has been EK’s dedication to leading the KM field in thought leadership.

Ben White will present ‘Taxonomy Design? Your AI Model Depends on It!’ covering the key role taxonomies and ontologies play in laying the foundation for Artificial Intelligence.

Connor Vilenio and Jenni Doughty will co-present ‘Rapid, AI-Assisted Taxonomy Development,’ detailing how AI and other semantic technologies can be leveraged in taxonomy design efforts to improve the quality and speed of the process.

Guillermo Galdamez will deliver a best practices and lessons learned session on Taxonomy Governance, titled ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective Taxonomy Governance,’ detailing the keys to effectively designing and managing taxonomy governance programs.

Maddie Fritz will co-present with EK COO Joe Hilger on ‘The Power of Knowledge Graphs,’ which will illustrate the business value and ROI of this cutting edge concept and technology by leveraging real world use cases.

Hilger will also present ‘Text Analytics and Graph Databases: A Powerful Combination’ at the Text Analytics Forum, where he’ll detail how text analytics and graph databases can be combined to improve the way information is used throughout organizations.

Finally, Zach Wahl, EK CEO will present ‘KM by the Numbers,’ where he’ll discuss the return on investment of Knowledge Management transformations, detailing specific metrics to quantify the business value of KM.

In addition to EK’s speaking roles, the company is also serving as a sponsor for KMWorld for the seventh year in a row.

Visit the conference site for more information and to register for the conference. 

The post Enterprise Knowledge Sponsoring and Speaking at KMWorld 2020 appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Enterprise Knowledge, in a continued commitment to thought leadership, has launched a new podcast to supplement the hundreds of other thought leadership articles on their website. The podcast, titled Knowledge Cast, features interviews with global KM, Information Management, and Data Management practitioners, internal experts, and KM consultants, discussing KM trends, technologies, and methodologies.

EK’s knowledge base already contains hundreds of blogs, white papers, videos, and presentation decks by EK’s own expert knowledge management consultants. The addition of this podcast serves as an extension of EK’s thought leadership, introducing a new medium and engaging experts external to EK in the discussion.

Episodes of Knowledge Cast may be found in our Knowledge Base, with additional episodes to be published on a regular basis.

The post Enterprise Knowledge Launches Podcast appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

The award, given to EK based on an anonymous employee survey, highlights EK’s unique benefits, commitment to philanthropy, learning and development opportunities, and company culture. This is the fourth year in a row that EK has been named a Best Place to Work by Washington Business Journal. This year, EK was ranked at #14 in the medium business category.

“Thanks to Washington Business Journal for once again recognizing EK as a great place to work,” said EK CEO Zach Wahl. “Especially during these challenging times for the world, it is amazing to see the team rallying and coming together in support of their colleagues and clients.”

Joe Hilger, EK COO added, “Even during this time of remote work due to the pandemic, our team continues to grow and flourish. I couldn’t be prouder of this wonderful group of people.”

In addition to being named a Great Place to Work, EK has won a number of other recent awards, including:

• Best Places to Work in DC by the Washington Business Journal (2017, 2018, 2019)
• Inc. Magazine Best Workplace (2018, 2019)
• Inc. Magazine 5000 Fastest Growing Companies in the U.S. (2018, 2019, 2020)
• KMWorld 100 Companies that Matter in KM (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020)
• KMWorld AI 50 – Leading Companies in Artificial Intelligence (2020)
• “Fast Four” award for fastest growing companies from Arlington Economic Development (2016)
• “Fantastic 50” fastest growing companies in Virginia (2019, 2020)

To view our current openings, visit our careers page.

The post Enterprise Knowledge Named Washington Business Journal (WBJ) Best Place to Work 2020 appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

In the past decade, EK employees have published over 230 pieces of thought leadership, addressing everything from best practices and success stories, to key insights and lessons learned. Sharing our knowledge and expertise is one of our guiding principles at EK, and we are proud of the thought leadership generated by our team and the way it contributes to our industry and community. Below are the top 10 most viewed blogs and white papers written by EK employees within the last decade:

1. Folders v. Metadata in SharePoint Document Libraries

Clients often ask us why we recommend using metadata over managing folders and subfolders in a SharePoint document library. In this white paper, Tatiana Baquero Cakici explains the advantages of tagging documents with metadata versus simply using folders to organize and navigate through documents in SharePoint document libraries.

2. Taxonomy Design Best Practices

Zach Wahl’s advice for clients struggling with taxonomy design still reigns true: “focus on practical business value for the business and business users, and your taxonomy design effort will be off to the right start.” In this blog, Wahl lists the nine best practices for taxonomy design that place business value at the center, ensuring long term success and adoption of taxonomy initiatives.  

3. Creating a Management Metadata Column in SharePoint Online

The managed metadata column is one of the most effective means for implementing business taxonomies in SharePoint. It offers multiple options and flexibility for taxonomists to implement and manage their designs, and for organizations to implement and evolve their business taxonomies more efficiently. Read Tatiana Baquero Cakici’s white paper to learn more. 

4. What is an Ontology and Why Do I Want One?

If you are like many of our clients, you may be asking “What is an ontology and why do I want one?” Within the last few years, ontologies and semantic technologies have matured to the point where they are widely available and reasonably priced. Read Joe Hilger’s blog to learn how EK defines an ontology and how ontologies can help improve the findability and discoverability of an organization’s content. 

5. What is an Enterprise Knowledge Graph and Why Do I Want One?

Knowledge graphs are foundational for achieving smart, semantic artificial intelligence applications (AI) that can help an organization discover insights from its content, data, and organizational knowledge, which would otherwise go unnoticed. In this blog, Yanko Ivanov provides a high-level overview of the components that make up an enterprise knowledge graph and discusses the value knowledge graphs can bring to your organization.

6. What is Knowledge Management and Why is it Important?

Knowledge Management as a practice often struggles with its own identity. There are any number of definitions of KM, many of which put too much stress on the tacit knowledge side of the knowledge and information management spectrum, are overly academic, or are simply too abstract. Learn how EK defines Knowledge Management in this blog written by Zach Wahl.

7. IV&V for Agile Projects

The move to Agile poses a number of challenges for government agencies as they need to fit the new Agile development techniques into their current, controlled environments. Joe Hilger’s white paper explains how Agile and independent verification and validation (IV&V) can work together and offers a list of best practices for incorporating IV&V into Agile projects.

8. Maximizing and Measuring User Adoption

Organizations often invest large amounts of money in new technology with the intention of improving employee productivity. The key to getting a significant return on these investments is to make sure your project team has what it takes to define, drive, and measure success. In this blog, Mary Little offers practical tips on how to maximize and measure user adoption to ensure that an organization’s new tool or process is fully embraced by those for whom it was designed for. 

9. Why Agile Fails When Organizations Try to “Go Agile”

At EK, we’re commonly asked how organizations can identify causes for Agile mishaps, detect failure trajectories early, and become equipped to avoid pitfalls while they transition to Agile. In this blog, Lulit Tesfaye shares her take on common reasons for why Agile fails and offers key recommendations to help organizations overcome obstacles when transitioning to Agile.

10. Designing a Learning Environment 

Learning Environments have the potential to harness the power of informal and social learning as a complement to formal learning, but users have to be able to find all of those carefully curated resources to maximize the value of the enterprise’s knowledge and information. Read Rebecca Wyatt’s blog to learn how EK’s own Knowledge and Information Management design principles align with the key steps of designing a Learning Environment. 

Which EK blogs were your favorites, and what topics would you like to see us write about in 2020? Let us know on Twitter, or reach out at info@enterprise-knowledge.com.

The post Top 10 EK Blogs of the Decade appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Effective change management requires the ultimate war-room strategy. You must win over the hearts and minds of the people and ensure those hearts and minds lead to hands doing things in the new way for the long run. Setting and implementing this strategy shouldn’t be squeezed into the precious few spare minutes of your day. It’s too important. I know that you know this, and likely your senior leaders do as well, but getting leaders to allocate resources, including your time, into change management can be a challenge.

This 4-part blog series will give you the language to build a compelling case that will open the door to a fruitful discussion with your senior leaders regarding the change management you need in your organization. As you read, you’ll learn:

• What change management is and is not;
• A metaphor you can reuse to describe why change management matters;
• How to remove the mystery of change management by describing the work that will take place in three distinct phases;
• How you’ll use internal data to make evidence-based decisions; and
• How you’ll calculate and report ROI.

With this knowledge in hand you will be able to concretely answer the questions that your leaders have and secure the change management support you need.

Blog 1: The Change Management You Need

Seek First to Understand

As a change management practitioner, I often need to explain what change management is. However, as Steven Covey advocates in his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, I try and “seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Therefore, I begin this kind of conversation by aiming to understand what my client’s perceptions of change management are. Often, I’ll hear something along the lines of “that’s the thing you do to get adoption, right?” The frequency of this answer is revealing, as it has demonstrated to me that there is a lot of ambiguity and a lack of understanding of what change management is and what adoption really means.

Change management, at its core, is about changing mindsets, changing behaviors, and then reinforcing and sustaining those changes over time. Good change management, however, also needs to address the complexities of modifying behavior, impacting culture, and gaining real return on the initiative that is being invested in. At EK, our change management experts take “good” change management a step further, practicing what we refer to as Integrated Change Management (ICM).

Integrated Change Management

ICM is the act of integrating leadership support, employee engagement, messaging, processes, success-metrics, and training to ensure swift and sustained adoption of the new way. What makes ICM different from the standard, traditional approach is that we are not just sending out comms and crossing-our-fingers with the hope that people read the material, make the necessary changes, and become advocates rather than resistors. We put in the necessary work and then reap the gains. This is an approach that can be applied at the business-unit level or at the enterprise-level when multiple strategic changes are occurring at once. Additionally, our practitioners also recognize no organization is operating with unlimited time, resources, and funds, as many traditional approaches might suggest. Every organization has restraints, and ICM works within this reality to deliver the target outcomes.

Siloed Work

Many organizations have adopted siloed ways of working. Siloes were originally designed to help teams work more efficiently removing layers of the organization that might distract, detain or otherwise impede the work of a team. People become well-adapted to the processes in their silo and it can create the time-savings that organizations originally intended. Real issues crop up however, when teams need to work across silos. There aren’t tried-and-true processes in place for working across silos, but more importantly, and more often, the relationships are not in place. Relationships are an incredibly undervalued aspect of organizational productivity, the ability to manage change or knowledge transfer.

Because siloed work is incredibly common in today’s workplace, EK’s practitioners begin by getting the structure and processes in place for people across departments and divisions to work efficiently together and build the needed relationships that ‘adoption of the new’ will require. Otherwise, we all know what will happen: hastily drawn up communications plans, strategic visions lost in translation, and mid-level managers struggling to convey to their individual contributors what is expected of them, resulting in a lackluster adoption rating. These are predictable risks that can be mitigated with ICM.

One Boat One Team

To better visualize how ICM works in practice, our consultants use the metaphor of a crew team and the sport of rowing because crew is the ultimate team sport. Every rower must operate their oar in sync with their teammates, entering and coming out of the water at the same time, because every stroke, from each rower, affects the team’s success. It looks easy and effortless when it’s done right, but crew demands that individuals come together to achieve a shared objective. There is no room for individual stars or people chasing personal goals. It requires a “one boat, one team” mentality.

Like crew, committing to long-term change takes grit, stamina, discipline, focus, steadiness, and, yes, sometimes even strength – strength to stand up to possible resistance. One of my colleagues at EK, a former rower and coxswain at the University of Oxford, says of her experience on a crew team: “Despite all the preparation, if you are not in sync, it does not matter how hard you try.”

When managing change, it does not matter how strong each individual leading the change is. What matters most is that all the players are in sync. This ranges from establishing a clear and succinct purpose, to understanding what metrics most signify ROI, to operationalizing the change into the day-to-day reality of the organization. Spending the time upfront by laying the groundwork for change is where you’ll see the most return on investment of effort.

Conclusion

Change management is not simple, but it doesn’t have to be hard. There are ways to work with your organization instead of against it to set up the right structure, processes and relationships to support change at either the business-unit or enterprise-level. This scaffolding has to be set up at the beginning of the initiative, do not save change management for the tail end of the engagement. It is a lesson that too many organizations have learned the hard way. Let’s do change differently this time. Let’s do ICM.

In the upcoming blogs, learn in detail how our experts execute ICM, and set yourself up to take the right steps at the right time, guiding your organization towards success and bringing the vision state to reality.

The post Change Management: If It’s Not Integrated, It’s Not Going to Work appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Enterprise Knowledge President and CEO Zach Wahl was named a 2018 Rising Star of GovCon by DCA Live. The annual award recognizes up-and-coming business executives who have contributed to the growth and success of government contracting.

“I’m grateful to DCA Live for this recognition,” said Wahl. “At EK, we’re constantly striving to bring leading edge Agile Knowledge Management solutions to the Federal Government.  This award is shared by everyone at EK as we work to support our government clients.”

DCA Live’s 2018 Rising Stars of GovCon list awards key players in the region’s growing government contracting industry. Over the past several decades, this space has honored emerging leaders from executive leadership, finance, technology, sales and marketing and other areas. An award ceremony will be held on October 23 at Highline RxR in Arlington, Va.

The post Wahl Named a 2018 Rising Star of GovCon appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

The post Washington Business Journal 2017 Best Place to Work Video appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.