The Challenge

A capital producer understood the complexity of navigating international regulatory environments. Operating across nations in numerous fields of specialization, the organization had to uphold diverse and disparate ordinances, many of which have changed over time. Dedicated to providing high-quality services to their customers, the organization sought a solution that would help them better navigate revisions to compliance requirements and ensure adherence to rigorous standards of excellence.

Like many companies, the capital producer relied on manual processes to identify, track, and communicate regulations across the organization. Unfortunately, manual approaches exposed the organization to human error, a possibility that threatened its ability to remain compliant. Since regulatory adherence depends on numerous team members throughout the organization, there were various potential points of failure, many of which were unknown. Staff had to personally determine how to best share sensitive information between groups, which created inefficiencies and risked information exposure. When these processes were performed correctly, they frequently included periods of redundancy where staff members duplicated each other’s efforts, thus diminishing organizational productivity. 

The Solution

To facilitate the organization’s compliance with regulations and standards, EK provided the capital producer with a comprehensive content management strategy rooted in knowledge management (KM) best practices. EK’s recommendations were informed by 11 separate interviews, four system demos, and 28 business unit validation workshop participants. EK spoke to executive stakeholders, content owners, system owners, and process performers throughout the organization. Based on these conversations and demonstrations of the organization’s current processes, EK developed a content strategy at the intersection of content and knowledge management. Recommendations for the organization were divided into five separate workstreams, based upon EK’s proprietary content strategy for KM evaluation framework, and broken down into the strategic and business impact of each item.

Leveraging EK’s expertise in semantics and data-driven knowledge management, EK delivered a content strategy with an emphasis on the structure, metadata, and management requirements for key organizational content types. For example, contracts exist currently as unstructured content, and in this organization’s use case can continue to be managed as such. Formulas for certain products, however, require robust security and personalization to enable regulatory compliance across multiple countries. These complex requirements necessitated a recommendation for structured formula content managed in a Product Information Management System (PIMS). 

Additionally, EK created a technology solution approach that not only identified existing pain points in the organization but also mapped each challenge to a corresponding technology solution. EK prioritized technical approaches that could easily work within the capital producer’s current technical ecosystem, minimizing the cost of integrating these solutions. At the start of the engagement, the organization was leveraging SharePoint for all content management needs. EK’s technology recommendations included strategies to optimize the use of SharePoint for appropriate use cases as well as recommendations for specialized contract management systems for product lifecycle management and contract management.

Implementing technological and procedural changes within the capital producer will allow the organization to continue to grow globally while providing compliant and high-quality products for its consumers. EK’s proposed content management approach will enable staff to better create, protect, share, and utilize compliance content to ensure the seamless continuity of operations, establish secure intellectual property, and achieve operational efficiencies. 

The EK Difference

Our team worked closely with the organization’s stakeholders to produce a content management strategy that would help them achieve larger knowledge objectives. Establishing processes and avenues for information sharing will enable the organization to not only uphold international standards of compliance but also increase productivity over time by efficiently sharing information and preserving tacit knowledge.

This engagement operated within the intersection of content management and KM. EK leveraged its KM background to guide this content strategy approach and used KM best practices to conduct knowledge-gathering activities, including document review, stakeholder interviews, stakeholder workshops, and system demos. After reviewing this information, EK was able to use its proprietary current state and target state framework to conduct a content management analysis at the organization. 

EK additionally utilized an ontological data modeling approach to guide its advanced content management strategy. The capital producer was exclusively a document-based organization at the beginning of the engagement; with EK’s support, they identified a future-ready content strategy for prioritized content use cases. There are a variety of content management approaches that can be used to provide structure to digital materials. These methods can be viewed on a continuum from file-level management to semantically enriched component management. However, not all approaches are the right fit for every client. Our content strategy and operations experts were able to ascertain the right level of content management for various use cases at the organization and ultimately provide them with a detailed technical plan for how to implement the right content management strategy. 

The Challenge

Technology is increasingly used as both a force for good and as a means to exploit vulnerabilities that greatly damage organizations – whether financially, reputationally, or through the release of classified information. Consequently, efforts to combat this fraud must evolve to become more sophisticated with each passing day. The field of fraud analytics is rapidly emerging and, over the past 10 years, has expanded to include graph analytics as a critical method for detecting suspicious behavior. 

In one such application, a national agency overseeing insurance claims engaged EK to advise on developing and implementing graph-based analytics to support fraud detection. The agency had a capable team of data scientists, program analysts, and engineers focused on identifying suspicious activity among insurance claims, such as:

• Personal information being reused across multiple claims;
• Claims being filed under the identities of deceased individuals; or
• Individuals claiming insurance from multiple locations. 

However, they were reliant on relational databases to accomplish these tasks. This made it difficult for program analysts to identify subtle connections between records in tabular format, with data points often differing by just a single digit or character. Additionally, while the organization was effective at flagging anomalies and detecting potentially suspicious behavior, they faced challenges relating to legacy software applications and limited traditional data analytics processes. 

EK was engaged to provide the agency with guidance on standing up graph capabilities. This graph-based solution would transform claim information into interconnected nodes, revealing hidden relationships and patterns among potentially fraudulent claims. In addition, EK was asked to build the agency’s internal expertise in graph analytics by sharing the methods and processes required to uncover deeper, previously undetectable patterns of suspicious behavior.

The Solution

To design a solution suitable for the agency’s production environment, EK began by assessing the client’s existing data infrastructure and analytical capabilities. Their initial cloud solution featured a relational database, which EK suggested extending with a graph database through the same cloud computing platform vendor for easy integration. Additionally, to identify suspicious connections between claims in a visual format, EK recommended an approach for the agency to select and integrate a link analysis visualization tool. These tools are crucial to a link analysis solution and allow for the graphical visualization of entities alongside behavior detection features that identify data anomalies, such as timeline views of relationship formation. EK made this recommendation using a custom and proprietary tooling evaluation matrix that facilitates informed decision-making based on a client’s priority factors. Once the requisite link analysis components were identified, EK delivered a solution architecture with advanced graph machine learning functionality and an intuitive user experience that promoted widespread adoption among technical and nontechnical stakeholders alike.

EK also assessed the agency’s baseline understanding of graphical link analysis and developed a plan for upskilling existing data scientists and program analysts on the foundations of link analysis. Through a series of primer sessions, EK’s subject matter experts introduced key concepts such as knowledge graphs, graph-based link analysis for detecting potentially suspicious behavior, and the underlying technology architecture required to instantiate a fully functional solution at the agency.

Finally, EK applied our link analysis experience to address client challenges by laying out a roadmap and implementation plan that detailed challenges along with proposed solutions to overcome them. This took the form of 24 separate recommendations and the delivery of bespoke materials meant to serve as quick-start guides for client reference.

The EK Difference

A standout feature of this project is its novel, generalizable technical architecture:

Furthermore, EK adapted a link analysis maturity benchmark and tool evaluation matrix to meet the agency’s needs and ensure that all solutions were aligned with the agency’s goal. Recognizing that no two clients face identical challenges, EK delivered a customized suite of recommendations and supporting materials that directly addressed the agency’s priorities, constraints, and long-term needs for scale.

The Solution

To address these challenges, the project team developed a proof-of-concept (POC) that leveraged advanced graph technology combined with AI-augmented classification techniques. 

The solution was implemented across several workstreams:

Defining System Functionality
The initial phase involved clearly articulating the use case. By mapping out the decision landscape—from strategic objectives (improving modern contraceptive prevalence rates) to granular insights from user research—the team designed a tailored taxonomy and ontology for the women’s health domain. This semantic framework was engineered to capture cultural nuances, local linguistic variations, and the diverse attributes influencing contraceptive choices.

Processing Existing Data
With the functionality defined, the next phase involved transforming internal survey responses and investment documents into a unified, structured format. An AI-augmented classification workflow was deployed to extract tacit knowledge from survey responses. This process was supported by a stakeholder-validated taxonomy and ontology, allowing raw responses to be mapped into clearly defined data classes. This robust data processing pipeline ensured that quantitative measures (like frequency of citation) and qualitative insights were captured in a cohesive base graph.

Building the Analysis Model
The core of the solution was the creation of a Product Adoption Survey Base Graph. Processed data was converted into RDF triples using a rigorous ontology model, forming the base graph designed to answer competency questions via SPARQL queries. While this model laid the foundation for revealing correlations and decision factors, the full production of the advanced analysis graph—designed to incorporate deeper inference and reasoning—remained as a future enhancement.

Handoff of Analysis Graph Production and Frontend Implementation
Due to time constraints, the production of the comprehensive analysis graph and the implementation of the interactive front end were transitioned to the client. Our team delivered the base graph and all necessary supporting documentation, providing the client with a solid foundation and a detailed roadmap for further development. This handoff ensures that the client’s in-house teams can continue productionalizing the analysis graph and integrate it with their BI dashboard for end-user access.

Provide a Roadmap for Further Development
Beyond the initial POC, a clear roadmap was established. The next steps include refining the AI classification workflow, fully instantiating the analysis graph with enhanced reasoning capabilities, and developing the front end to expose these insights via a business intelligence (BI) dashboard. These tasks have been handed off to the client, along with guidance on leveraging enterprise graph database licenses and integrating the solution within existing knowledge management frameworks.

 

The EK Difference

A standout feature of this project is its novel, generalizable technical architecture:

AI-Augmented Classification Pipeline:
The solution leverages state-of-the-art language models to perform the initial classification of survey responses. Supported by a validated taxonomy, this pipeline automatically extracts and tags critical data points from large volumes of survey content, laying the groundwork for subsequent graph instantiation, inference, and analysis.

 

The Solution

Over the course of four months, EK facilitated focus groups and interviews with team members from across various business units at the organization to gather a diverse array of perspectives and establish a reference point upon which to analyze their current state and measure future success. The baseline scores for each workstream (People, Process, Content, Culture, Technology) within EK’s proprietary KM Maturity Benchmark were provided to the organization to allow them to gain an understanding of which factors were the most impactful on KM across the organization, as well as strengths they could leverage and areas where they could improve. Through these activities and a review of pertinent systems and documentation, EK identified critical business needs surrounding KM and the challenges that team members faced.

After a thorough analysis of their present capabilities, EK again utilized our KM Maturity Benchmark and collaborated with the company to prioritize three areas of focus:

• Enterprise Search: Implement a universal enterprise search tool to locate and pull content from all integrated systems and repositories across the enterprise, and present action-oriented search results in an intuitive manner to enable employees to find the answer to their query before or at the time of need.
• Content Strategy: Develop an enterprise content strategy to address current and future processes for content management, with the intent of mitigating unstructured content that is duplicative, obsolete, or outdated.
• KM Leadership: Establish an enterprise-wide approach to KM leadership, and formalize responsibilities for securing and procuring KM resources.

These recommendations, among others, were leveraged to create a fully customized, actionable KM Roadmap spanning three years, outlining activities, their estimated duration, and the order in which to approach them to guide the development of current KM practices at the organization.

The EK Difference

In EK’s conversations with the organization’s core team and stakeholders, we observed a keen interest in implementing Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the organization, but no enterprise-level guidance to do so. We dug deeper to understand and learn more about their desires for AI concurrent to our assessment of their organization. To help educate and support the organization in their journey to Enterprise AI, EK held an AI Knowledge Share for approximately 50+ employees. EK also outlined three pilots that could be pursued to achieve more advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities, providing staff with powerful tools to find and discover information at the time of need.

A key element of our assessment was the usage of EK’s proprietary KM Maturity Benchmark to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the five KM workstreams within the organization – People, Process, Content, Culture, and Technology. Each factor in the benchmark is based on proven KM best practices and denotes measurable practices and characteristics within an organization which are then evaluated by our team of impartial experts, reducing bias in defining the current state of KM at the organization and providing them with an industry-relevant, quantifiable measurement of their KM maturity. This analysis allowed EK to provide a practical baseline for context-based recommendations and ensured that we delivered a highly detailed and actionable plan for solving the organization’s KM needs.

EK approached this project with a unique combination of “soft” and “hard” recommendations and techniques, bridging the gap between KM concepts (people, process, content, culture) and practical KM solutions (technology, integrations). By combining employee focus groups and interviews with a quantifiable benchmark, EK was able to address each type of challenge in the organization, from search and content difficulties to a desire for greater KM expertise and leadership.

The Results

Over the course of this engagement, EK provided the organization with the following:

• Current State Assessment and Benchmark that assessed KM practices and tools throughout the organization, providing them with a deeper understanding of their KM maturity level and identifying high-impact areas for improvement;
• Target State Assessment and Benchmark that defined the future state of KM at the company, focusing on the improvements that will yield the greatest impact and business value. The Target State represents a realistic vision for what the organization can achieve upon improvement beyond the current baseline; and
• A fully customized, iterative, task-based KM Roadmap and Recommendations that addressed this organization’s KM needs and gaps to help the organization enhance its overall KM maturity and achieve its strategic objectives. The Roadmap included 14 recommended activities focused on Enterprise Search, Content Strategy, and KM Leadership, as well as provided metrics upon which to measure the organization’s success to help emphasize the business value of knowledge management to stakeholders and leadership.

Leveraging these deliverables will allow this organization to increase employee engagement by supporting cross-functional communication, enabling employees to work more efficiently and share knowledge more effectively. This will also boost productivity and increase rates of collaboration, retention, and satisfaction while cultivating innovation and creativity within the organization by building connection and collaboration among employees. The company will also be able to enhance their client reputation by eliminating discrepancies in product documentation and providing their employees the tools to better support customers, drive company performance by increasing exposure to new ideas across the enterprise, and secure information in shared spaces to prevent unintentional disclosures. Finally, these deliverables will ensure alignment across teams to a single set of goals and expectations for Enterprise AI, grounding the company in a future-oriented mindset.

The Challenge

Their Challenge:

One of the top telecommunication companies in the world is pursuing an ambitious corporate strategy that entails a digital transformation of its entire operations, expanding its service offerings, and exploiting new business opportunities to become a global reference point and leader within its industry. They sought a partnership with Enterprise Knowledge (EK) to assess the company’s current knowledge management (KM) maturity and elaborate a vision for future KM capabilities and practice that would support this corporate agenda. 

During the process of defining a KM Strategy and Roadmap to guide the company in increasing its KM maturity, EK surfaced important considerations – based on the company’s culture and staff’s experience with past changes – that would need to be addressed when implementing the KM Strategy and Roadmap and introducing the associated changes:

• Communication around past initiatives has been either too complex for staff to understand the initiative’s value or hasn’t been sufficiently targeted to specific employee groups. Staff hasn’t had a clear understanding of how a change will benefit them, resulting in reduced engagement. 
• The company hasn’t typically established two-way communication channels during a change initiative to address concerns, mitigate resistance, correct misinformation, and allow for input that can drive improvements to those overseeing a change.
• Staff primarily follow vertical lines of communication to share information from senior leadership to non-supervisory employees. As a result, important information doesn’t always trickle down to non-supervisory employees. 
• Those in middle management have not been fully “activated” – they aren’t always communicating in a way to help their employees understand the need for and impact of an organizational change, nor are they holding their staff accountable to requested changes.
• There are many concurrent activities that are requiring staff to take on new projects and responsibilities, adapt to new requirements, and adjust ways of working. Staff are experiencing varying levels of change fatigue, and express uncertainty over how these initiatives are aligned and where to focus their attention.
• There are groups within the company who are more heavily invested in how things are done today as well as those who are more responsive to change. This reality plays out in the varying degrees to which people are willing to share information with their colleagues. 

The Solution

As part of EK’s nine-month, enterprise-wide effort to assess the company’s current KM maturity and elaborate a vision for future KM capabilities and practices, EK developed an Integrated Change Management Plan to support the implementation of the KM Strategy and Roadmap. To define a bespoke set of change management recommendations and communication practices, EK engaged internal stakeholders to discuss 1) lessons learnt from their past experiences with organizational changes, 2) the critical factors that mean the difference between success and failure on a project or change initiative, and 3) how information gets distributed across the organization and top down. EK disseminated and analyzed results of a KM survey to surface staff perspectives on what motivations (e.g., incentives, rewards, and recognition) could be offered or would be desired to support KM practices. Additionally, EK led interviews and workshops that informed our understanding of the company’s organizational structure, lines of authority, information flow patterns, cultural nuances, and those who could serve as key partners in supporting the KM Strategy and Roadmap. 

The Integrated Change Management Plans includes:

• A purpose statement to generate momentum and align on what success is anticipated to look like as a result of implementing the KM Strategy and Roadmap.
• A list of success indicators and preliminary activities to guide the company’s change management strategy and track whether outcomes are being realized. 
• The people who will be impacted by and whose involvement will be necessary in the implementation of the KM Strategy and Roadmap.
• Critical messages to use and considerations to keep in mind when communicating about the KM Strategy and Roadmap.
• Recommendations for how to address risks that are unique to the company’s culture and organization and that could jeopardize success of the KM Strategy and Roadmap if left unattended. 

The EK Difference

EK engaged the company’s KM project team in helping to define what success will look like for its KM Strategy throughout the implementation of the two-year Roadmap. Through holding a Visioning workshop with the KM project team, EK was able to co-create success indicators – i.e., outcome-based statements that are specific and measurable – that would ultimately support the company in tracking whether it is realizing the outcomes it hopes to achieve with a KM Strategy. This co-creation session was critical to gaining alignment on what success will look like and identifying a “North Star” for the Strategy. By engaging the KM project team as partners in this process, EK was able to understand what meaningful success looks like and develop a process that the company can use to define: corresponding metrics for each success indicator; the critical behaviors that will need to be performed consistently by the company’s workforce to bring about success; and the ways in which the company can provide support for critical behaviors to ensure those behaviors occur at the desired consistency and rate. 

The Results

The company was appreciative of the detail and customization that were evidenced in the Integrated Change Management Plan. The company continues to work with EK to provide training to KM team members focused on strengthening their ability to manage and lead change. With the Integrated Change Management Plan, the company’s KM Leadership Team are well equipped to: 

• Give the implementation of the KM Strategy and Roadmap high relevance and visibility;
• Facilitate open communication about the Strategy’s purpose and desired outcomes;
• Educate employees on how they can expect to benefit from having more robust knowledge capture, storing, and sharing practices in place;
• Communicate the roles, responsibilities, and expectations of leadership, middle management, and non-supervisory staff in leading and supporting the rollout of the KM Roadmap; and
• Make data-driven decisions on how to pivot communication and engagement strategies as needed.

The company’s Integrated Change Management Plan provides recommendations that will support the company’s workforce in sustainably adjusting to new ways of creating, managing, storing, and sharing knowledge, information and data. With an Integrated Change Management Plan to accompany its KM Strategy and Roadmap, the company is well positioned to realize its corporate agenda and goals of enabling staff to exchange knowledge, experience, and insights in support of collaborative problem-solving, decision-making, and the development of transformative services and platforms.

The Challenge

One of the top telecommunication companies in the world is pursuing an ambitious corporate strategy that entails a digital transformation of its entire operations, expanding its service offerings, and exploiting new business opportunities to become a global reference point and leader within its industry. However, they quickly came across several KM-related issues that impeded the progress they sought to make:

• Their tens of thousands of employees were not able to efficiently or effectively collaborate across functional areas;
• Working-level staff relied heavily on their immediate supervisors to provide them with the information they needed to accomplish their responsibilities;
• Conversely, middle management spent too much time gathering, validating, and delivering information to their staff instead of focusing on making decisions and higher-value activities; and
• Project teams experienced difficulty in leveraging the experience and lessons learned as part of previous work.

The Solution

EK conducted a multi month enterprise-wide effort to assess the company’s current KM maturity and elaborate a vision for future KM capabilities and practices. Having achieved a comprehensive view of the company through the discovery and analysis activities, EK designed a KM strategy and roadmap to guide the company to increase its KM maturity over a 3 year period. In addition, EK developed a detailed KM Platform Business Case and Prioritized Backlog of KM features to support the company’s ambition to select and implement new technology to modernize its KM ecosystem. 

The strategy and roadmap set forth recommendations along several categories:

1. Enterprise-wide workstreams and activities, consisting of several months-long efforts to stand up new KM structures and practices;
2. Enterprise-wide pilot activities, meant to quickly implement KM solutions, demonstrate their value, and replicate across several teams in multiple iterations;
3. Division-wide pilot activities, targeted to address the specific KM pain points experienced by their staff; and
4. Technical KM enhancements to improve the use of existing technology and introduce new solutions to support the organization’s KM efforts and needs. In support of the technology recommendations, EK developed a proof of concept to demonstrate the features and benefits of a knowledge base integrated with a semantic solution and a search engine.

The EK Difference

EK established a close partnership with the KM team, working together to engage senior executives, mid-level management, subject matter experts, and staff across all of the company’s business sectors. This approach allowed EK to listen to a variety of voices across the organization and gain a deep understanding of the business drivers behind KM, identify the specific needs of each functional area and how they may benefit from better KM practices, and to learn how the staff currently leverages technology provided by the company. Importantly, EK was able to surface and anticipate potential obstacles to change and the resources that the company would be able to leverage to influence positive KM outcomes.

EK also aligned with the technology sector to gain understanding of the company’s technology ecosystem and determine which resources and systems were already being leveraged to support KM efforts. This was important to reduce the risk of imposing unnecessary new technologies on the company.

Finally, EK took care to provide clear guidance and transfer critical knowledge and expertise to the company’s emerging KM team. We established touchpoints after each milestone to explain our approach, the rationale behind any recommendations, and clarify any doubts. However, EK maintained open communication channels throughout the project to provide continuous coaching on how to address KM challenges, and communicating to senior executives and other stakeholders, so that KM would get buy-in across a wide audience.

The Results

The complete set of recommendations were accepted by executive sponsors and the company continues to work with EK to expand the KM team and its capabilities, and implement solutions based on the recommendations set forth by EK. Moreover, and given EK’s coaching, the company’s KM team positioned themselves as credible and capable partners to the rest of the organization, gaining accolades and recognition from their executive sponsors.

In conclusion, the recommended solutions will support the company in:

• Putting in place tools, processes, and incentives to encourage the creation and dissemination of digital knowledge assets;
• Designating repositories where information and data can be securely stored so staff can have easy access to them;
• Continuously improving its operations to preserve and leverage its institutional knowledge and experience;
• Providing new tools, spaces, and opportunities for staff to share knowledge, experience, and best practices;
• Maintaining consistency in interactions with customers and improving the quality of service by enabling frontline staff to find high quality resources in the form of documentation, guides, and data;
• Seamlessly connecting multiple systems across the enterprise using AI and semantic solutions to extract value from data about consumers and the company’s services;
• Providing high quality data that is immediately available for analyses and faster decision-making;
• Enabling experts and teams to connect, collaborate, and create synergies using new platforms; and
• Utilizing improved communication platforms to allow ideas to surface more easily and drive innovation.