The Solution

To support the creation of a taxonomy for the healthcare organization’s call center, EK facilitated a taxonomy design workshop with key stakeholders from the call center, consisting of several succinct sessions with dozens of participants from across the organization. In order to gain a better understanding of the healthcare organization’s current user needs, EK facilitated five different activities: a Personas Activity, a User Stories Activity, a Content Types Activity, a Metadata Fields Activity, and a Taxonomy Governance Activity, using the online whiteboard tools Mural and RetroTool. EK also facilitated guided discussions on Taxonomy, Core Workflows, and Content Governance. EK compiled these findings into a Taxonomy Workshop Report which contained our recommendations surrounding baseline taxonomy design, content types, and information architecture, as well as suggestions for content management and taxonomy governance, including a proposed taxonomy governance model. 

Following the delivery of the Taxonomy Workshop Report, EK held additional sessions with the company stakeholders to better understand their current content management and governance processes. To summarize these findings and analyses, EK delivered a Content Governance Plan which provided detailed recommendations on how the healthcare organization could effectively store and manage their content in the short- and long-term. More specifically, the Content Governance Report included a Content Governance Model with associated roles and responsibilities that aligned to governance and KM best practices; governance processes and workflows for adding, updating, and archiving content; a structure for content governance team meetings; preliminary content management best practices for formatting and tagging content; and recommended next steps for the healthcare company to ensure optimal value was being derived from their call center content.

The EK Difference

To garner buy-in from users, EK facilitated multiple sessions following the delivery of the Taxonomy Workshop Report to answer both technical and non-technical questions about the report itself, as well as how the taxonomy would actually function within the knowledge management platform. By engaging in conversation with call center stakeholders, EK was able to answer pointed questions about specific aspects of the taxonomy report that otherwise would not have been addressed, further streamlining acceptance and adoption and allowing us to communicate the value of the taxonomy in business terms to a wide and diverse user group. EK also incorporated this direct stakeholder feedback into the Content Governance Report, highlighting and providing strong evidence for the most important and meaningful components based on what was learned during the additional sessions. 

Additionally, EK leveraged our years of experience and subject matter expertise in taxonomies and content management consulting to tailor our workshop agenda and materials to the specific challenges being faced by the call center, ultimately delivering more applicable and actionable plans that align with both industry best practices and the strategic goals of the overarching organization.

The Solution

Over the course of a four-month period, Enterprise Knowledge (EK) engaged with the client to perform a Technology Solution Recommendation that included a series of deliverables to address the client’s needs. EK first executed a current state assessment of the client’s technology and processes surrounding the management of the content. Following this assessment, and armed with the knowledge of the clients’ technological and business needs, EK devised a set of prioritized Business and Functional Requirements for the target state system, along with a business case for replatforming the client could use to garner buy-in and executive support.

Further, using the prioritized requirements devised by EK and signed off on by the client, EK identified three software solutions that would meet the needs of the client and developed a tailored recommendation. This recommendation was facilitated end-to-end by EK acting as the intermediary, reaching out to and facilitating initial conversations with potential vendors, arranging system demonstrations of the various products, and presenting a comprehensive, system-agnostic analysis of the options according to the client’s specifications/business case.

The EK Difference

EK’s approach to this engagement highlighted our expertise in the Knowledge Management (KM) space by combining several of our services into one offering. EK utilized our expertise in maturity assessments, use case and requirements analysis, and knowledge of the KM technology world to deliver a highly specialized and tailored recommendation to the client. Having seen similar use cases with previous clients, EK was able to quickly identify the type of solution sought after by the client and facilitate connections with multiple vendors within the span of a few weeks.

EK also utilized both bottom-up and top-down analyses by executing assessment activities from multiple touchpoints. EK recognizes the importance of a multi-faceted approach and therefore consulted with end users (bottom-up), the actual content in scope (bottom-up), executive leadership (top-down), and facilitated demonstrations of in-scope systems (bottom-down) to inform the final recommendation.

Lastly, EK fostered a working relationship with the client by holding weekly status meetings to check in on project progress and collaborating on various deliverables to ensure collective agreement. EK also acted as the intermediary with vendors to preserve the anonymity of the client and remained system-agnostic to ensure the client received unbiased and accurate recommendations.

The Solution

EK conducted a series of training activities over a multi-week period, focusing on organizational analysis and synthesis. In order to ensure that the organization’s leadership understood and accepted the proposed Target Organization Definition, EK conducted multiple feedback sessions with senior leadership to share the proposed organizational recommendations, gather feedback, and refine the model as needed. In these feedback sessions, EK elicited leadership’s perspectives on whether the proposed change practices were appropriately prioritized and covered the key initiatives and priorities of leadership. These sessions also allowed EK to identify and share problem points or bottlenecks in certain processes (e.g., lines of authority and decision-making, communications) and whether there were any opportunities to simplify organizational actions and processes. Following each of these sessions, the EK team made iterative edits and developments to the Target Organization Definition to ensure the organizational model remained up-to-date and in-line with organizational objectives.

EK also delivered a synthesized version of the Target Organization Definition as an executive briefing deck, to be used externally when updating current and future partners on the new organizational model. This deck provided the organization with a clean, marketable message to showcase their value to the broader federal agency and discuss planned changes to the organization. This executive briefing deck described the organization’s differentiated value, outlined why it is changing its approach to how it delivers its services, what its core offerings are, and what the organization is uniquely able to provide its partners. EK developed the deck iteratively, presenting leadership with a draft version from which to gather reactions and make adjustments.

The EK Difference

EK supported this organization throughout the entire project to design, develop, and implement the best possible solution for their needs. Beginning with the strategy and design phase of the project, EK conducted multiple rounds of workshops and focus groups to uncover the root of their challenges and discover the right people, processes, and content that should be included in the organizational model and involved in the change efforts. EK designed multiple iterations of the model to incorporate feedback from workshop participants and key stakeholders.

During the development process, EK leveraged Agile processes to maximize communication with organizational leadership and staff. User stories were expanded upon and business requirements were revised in a collaborative process between the design team and key stakeholders. EK began this engagement with a Current State SWOT Analysis, assessing the organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities for growth, and the roadblocks that could inhibit the project. This phase of work allowed EK a deeper understanding of the organization’s desired Target State. EK also provided change management, training, and a comprehensive transformation and roadmap plan to ensure a smooth transition and high adoption rate of new federal services and solutions.

The EK team displayed Agile approaches and methodology throughout this entire process, demonstrating to the organization’s staff how they should approach the implementation of the new organizational model. The model was developed iteratively, and at each phase, all stakeholders were given the opportunity to voice concerns and shift priorities. The change practices that EK advised to reach the Target State were supported by recommended actions and milestones, success criteria, and anticipated outcomes so that change management best practices would become second nature at this organization.

The Solution

This organization originally found EK using the KM Maturity Self-Assessment, which served as EK’s initial insight into the company and acted as the first input for both the KM Survey Report and KM Strategy Workshop Report. EK began the engagement by conducting various knowledge gathering activities, including interviews and focus groups, to assess the organization’s KM environment at a high level. In order to maximize the efficiency of client resources, EK developed and delivered a KM survey to a wider base of stakeholders to further identify their current KM strengths, challenges, areas for improvement, and priorities as cost-effectively as possible. The outputs of this time-saving survey were then compiled into a KM Survey Report.

Leveraging the KM baseline established by the report, EK planned and conducted a series of KM Strategy workshops in four 4-hour sessions over the course of 2 weeks, facilitating a total of 16 hours of activities with participants and accelerating the knowledge gathering process. These workshops resulted in a comprehensive KM Strategy Workshop Report and Roadmap that included targeted recommendations on how to achieve this organization’s desired target state, emphasizing quick wins and immediate benefits.

The EK Difference

EK began by engaging stakeholders at every level of the organization through interviews, focus groups, and a KM survey to quickly obtain a comprehensive understanding of the organization’s current capabilities. The interviews and focus groups were highly beneficial to this engagement as they allowed EK consultants to engage directly with stakeholders to uncover common problems and elicit consistent themes throughout the process. Because the organization comprised thousands of employees, interviews and focus groups were not enough to obtain a representative sample size. For this reason, EK also created and delivered a KM survey that was distributed to significantly more employees to increase representation and maximize EK’s time with the client. EK worked directly with the primary points of contact from the organization to specifically tailor the survey questions to relevant issues that they had been facing from all across the organization in order to streamline responses and ensure the results were immediately actionable. As a result, EK was able to obtain high qualitative value from direct interactions in the interviews and focus groups, as well as quantitative data and insights from the KM survey, creating a more comprehensive understanding of the organization’s challenges in a shorter period of time.

Further, the KM Strategy Workshops included facilitated lectures and interactive activities on Knowledge Management (KM), Agile, KM Objectives and Success Criteria, KM Challenges and Prioritization, Personas, Content Strategy, Taxonomy Design, Search Design, Governance, Change Management, and Organizational Challenges and Solutioning. These activities were designed to not only inform participants on these subject areas and the value they can provide to an organization, but also to encourage them to engage with one another interactively in applying these concepts to the actual problems they had been facing on a daily basis. By doing so, employees were simultaneously able to see tangible value in the KM solutions and concepts they were learning about, as well as garner enthusiasm and buy-in towards them because of the challenges they could potentially resolve. Furthermore, EK discovered tremendous value in bringing together stakeholders from across the organization, varying in geographic location, business unit, tenure, and experience level, to solve KM challenges together. This resulted in stakeholders finding common ground with one another and uncovering enterprise challenges that were applicable to all levels of the organization, demonstrating the immediate value of KM.

The Solution

EK facilitated a series of workshops, interviews, and focus groups with subject matter experts, content creators, and technical partners to define the current and target state of the retailer’s Content Management maturity using EK’s proprietary 50-factor Content Management Benchmark. EK then partnered with the learning team to define a fully customized, iterative, task-based content management strategy, implementation roadmap, and KM Platform design to help the learning team improve their Content Management maturity over a multi-year period using a phased approach. The KM Platform design featured recommendations to leverage new and existing technologies, including a metadata management hub, taxonomy management system, knowledge graph, and search engine. These technical recommendations have resulted in the creation of a digital library that is currently helping the retailer to more effectively and efficiently manage the sheer scale of content in their learning ecosystem, increase the organization’s speed in creating learning content, and decrease the time it takes associates to find and discover lessons.

The EK Difference

EK leveraged its unique, 50-factor benchmark to develop a comprehensive analysis of the retailer’s Content Management maturity and define a future state for the retailer to work towards. EK also utilized its thorough understanding of the client’s culture and processes to produce a Content Management Strategy and Roadmap for implementation using an iterative, Agile approach, and leveraged in-house technical expertise to recommend a unique set of technological solutions aimed at alleviating the inefficiencies the client was experiencing. 

The EK team was uniquely positioned to deliver expertise in learning solutions because of our extensive experience delivering KM training sessions, workshops, and materials to a variety of clients as well as our in-house team of instructional designers and learning technology experts. We have conducted dozens of similar efforts with organizations like this one, and the EK team was equipped to deliver both hands-on training and in-depth technical support. This enabled us to holistically understand this organization’s needs and develop a strategy to help the learning team find the learning content and training materials they needed to support the organization’s employees. The EK team also demonstrated effective knowledge transfer techniques that the learning team could then utilize within their own training efforts. 

EK is also skilled in bridging the gaps between strategy, design, and implementation, as this effort fused personal interaction with stakeholders to develop a content management strategy with targeted, technical recommendations to plan and implement a KM Platform design. Rather than evaluating just the current state of the organization and developing a strategy to address current challenges, the EK team worked with stakeholders to determine the organization’s long-term goals and recommended various technologies that would help the organization update and maintain its learning content in the future.   

The Solution

EK performed initial user and system research and analysis to identify issues and recommend solutions to improve overall UX. As part of this research, EK facilitated cross-departmental focus groups and workshops with stakeholders and SMEs, in addition to conducting a current and target state analysis. During these activities, EK identified strengths and challenges in multiple aspects of the content lifecycle, from authoring and publishing to end-user content engagement. The challenges identified in the analysis provided an opportunity to identify and prioritize relevant use cases, which helped shape the Agile product roadmap and EK’s tool recommendations. Additionally, the analysis enabled EK to identify user goals and evaluation criteria that could be measured to test solution effectiveness. The EK team also collaborated with taxonomy SMEs to review and improve the existing content metadata, providing the foundations for more granular content tagging. EK then developed an Agile product roadmap that incorporated our UX and system recommendations with iterative milestones and collaborated with the client company on implementing the multi-workstream roadmap to ensure the client company met its goals and improved solution effectiveness.

EK’s user and system research found a cycle of challenges that reduced user confidence in the client’s documentation hub.

The EK Difference

The EK team leveraged our experience with taxonomy design, ontology design, UX best practices, and enterprise search to design an Agile roadmap to achieve expanded search capabilities, governance workflows, and more personalized content experiences. Our certified taxonomists and ontologists collaborated with client company SMEs to capture and translate existing metadata and authoring processes into an expanded taxonomy that the CCMS could leverage for granular content tagging. EK’s expert taxonomy and ontology designers discerned metadata pain points to design and deliver data models that would support the client company’s current and future advanced user-driven use cases. EK also leveraged our knowledge graph experience to implement and query the data models created by the ontology designers to support the prioritized use cases surfaced from our initial research and analysis. The EK team leveraged our advanced content management, search, and knowledge management solution architecture experience to design a new system architecture that enables dynamic content assembly, improves search experience, provides personalized content to system users, and decreases manual authoring time spent creating the content.

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.