Entering the first full week of 2025, I’m happy to share the Enterprise Knowledge year in review for 2024. This has become a long-standing tradition, dating back to 2016. Every year this is a great reminder of how far we’ve come as an organization, the challenges we’ve overcome, and the ways we’ve chosen to lead the industry. For me, it is a great opportunity to reflect, thank our team for making EK what it is, and share some of our milestones and accomplishments with the community.
The year marked our twelfth consecutive year of growth. This consistency is only possible because we’ve maintained the vast majority of existing clients while winning new clients and accounts. This is a simple formula, but one that has been the hallmark of our steady growth, and with that growth comes the ability to deliver enterprise-level engagements with massive business impact for our clients. A great deal has changed at EK since our inception in 2013 and that first “Year in Review” blog in 2016, but our commitment to our team members, our clients, and the industry as a whole has remained true, as has that simple formula for growth.
As we now enter 2025, I feel equally enthusiastic and confident about what the year holds. We’ve long been accurately predicting the trends that shape our industry, which has allowed us to maintain our position of leadership and innovation in a highly dynamic set of fields. As we identified the Semantic Layer as the missing link in the AI Revolution, we’ve found ourselves leading and delivering at the intersections of Knowledge Management, Data Management, Information Management, and Information Technology. This translated to exceptional growth and engagement in the past year, resulting in record revenues, backlog of work, and overall headcount as we lead the way into 2025.
As has now become tradition, I’ll use EK’s six guiding principles to detail the year in review.
People – Our number one asset is our people. We invest in them and ensure they possess the knowledge and resources to serve our clients to the highest degree possible.
I remember back in 2015 we convened the team to help define EK’s guiding principles. At the time we were a team of six, without an office of our own, so a client graciously lent a conference room for us to work in. The first principle we defined was the above – our commitment to our People, and our commitment to investing in them. I’ve always said that my most important responsibility at EK is to ensure every team member feels honored, supported, and set up to grow at EK. Our high retention and even higher levels of quality and performance are a testament to that.
We maintained and expanded all of the elements of our benefits programs, EK Balance, and EK Grow, all dedicated to delivering the triad of learning, engagement, and collaboration to our team members. This included our continued learning benefit of a guaranteed $3,000 per year per employee for external training and conferences, our year-long onboarding program called Kamp EK (to which we added new modules for Project Managers and People Managers), our Lifelong Learning benefit of $1,000 per year for non-work related development, Pitches and Pints (where EK leadership coaches employees on public speaking over dinner), and EK’s Learning Cohorts, where EK leadership and subject matter experts teach new joiners EK’s core approaches and methodologies to quickly upskill them. I am commonly asked which traits I value most in new employees, and a passion for learning is always one of my answers. We’ve now established a suite of ways to reward and foster that passion.
In the office, we hosted yoga classes, massage days, breakfasts served by EK leadership, make-your-own-sundae bars, wine tastings, and other events dedicated to foster collaboration and build community amongst our rapidly growing team. At the same time, we recognized that much of our twenty percent growth in headcount came through our nationwide recruiting, hiring fully remote employees outside our headquarters area. To support the coast-to-coast community-building of our team, we flew everyone to headquarters three times over the course of the year for our traditional events of the annual Gala, Purple Elephant, and Pirate Ship Cruise.
We took advantage of each of these all-company gatherings to get to know each other better and celebrate, but also to conduct project-based working sessions and plan future EK initiatives in order to better deliver for our clients and better support and reward our employees. Preceding the recent Purple Elephant, our December holiday party, I asked the company to envision what EK would look like in 2027, and EK’s leadership team will take those visions into our planning for the years to come in order to deliver for the company, finding new ways to help the team continue to grow.
Thought Leadership – We serve as leaders in the industry, sharing our knowledge and expertise, guiding the development of knowledge, data, and information practices, and supporting the community.
Last year I celebrated a major milestone with our knowledge base: the publication of our 500th article. This year we blew past that, and now have over 600 blogs, white papers, case studies, slide presentations, videos, and podcast episodes in our knowledge base. I believe this makes us the largest single repository of Knowledge Management resources that are free and open to the public. On top of our knowledge base, our book, Making Knowledge Management Clickable, continued to receive attention and platitudes, and our podcast, “Knowledge Cast,” maintained its place as a top podcast in the field.
Over the course of the year, we drove the conversation in the industry, identifying new trends and providing detailed discussions, articles, and presentations with a focus on concrete business value and outcomes. We spoke at over twenty different conferences and events, notably keynoting both the Henry Stewart Semantic Data Conference (twice), as well as the inaugural Knowledge Summit Dublin event. At KMWorld, we once again had over a dozen different EK team members present. More importantly, overall we had nearly forty different team members speak at over twenty different conferences around the world. This is particularly notable to me as it demonstrates EK’s depth of thought leadership. We’re not just one or two big names in the industry – we are a deep pool of industry professionals and thought leaders helping to shape the future of the field more and more each year.
Also of particular note, we produced our own thought leadership event in Europe this past year. Recognizing a gap in industry discourse, we convened the Semantic Layer Symposium in Munich, Germany. The event brought together a select group of thought leaders and practitioners in the field of Knowledge Management, Data Management, Information Management, Artificial Intelligence, and the field of Semantics for a sales-free day of learning and discussion. Stay tuned for an upcoming announcement about 2025’s event.
All of our work again helped us to be recognized by the industry. Again this year, KMWorld and Info Today recognized EK as one of the 100 Companies That Matter in KM, as well as one of the AI 100: The Companies Empowering Intelligent Knowledge Management. Though I am always proud of the recognition, what matters a great deal more is how I see the industry as a whole, following our words and actions. This has allowed us to continue to attract the greatest talent in the field, while simultaneously spurring us to innovate further. As the industry leaders, our job isn’t just to suggest what’s next, it’s to deliver what’s next, and that is what we’ve been doing year after year.
Transparency – We communicate clearly and openly, ensuring the highest level of quality and accountability for our company’s management, in our service to our clients, and with respect to our colleagues.
As I’ve shared in the past, we endeavor to run EK as openly as possible, sharing company goals, misses, challenges, and mistakes with the team throughout the year. We hold twice monthly all-company knowledge shares with the team to do just that, and it has created a culture of openness, which it is my job to foster. During each year’s all-hands meetings, I have introduced a list of both challenges and accomplishments. Looking back, I’m proud to see how many of the previous year’s listed challenges become accomplishments in the following year, as we’ve rallied as a company to face these challenges directly and take concrete action.
Moreover, during these all-hands meetings, I also establish our goals for growth in the year to come. In a year where many services companies struggled, and where our space encountered greater competition, I was particularly proud to share with the team that we beat all of our growth and performance targets for the year.
This year, we officially established EK’s Project Management arm under a new Director in order to better measure EK’s performance, ensure quality on the larger and larger enterprise engagements with which we’re being trusted by our clients, and develop new project managers and project management standards to keep pace with the highly technical and complex nature of our work.
Recognizing the increasingly hybrid nature and growing size of our project teams, we also established a new project excellence tradition dedicated to building team identity and collaboration. Starting this year, we defined a standard of bringing all enterprise project teams together in the early stages of a new project to ensure the team understands their roles, is poised to be successful, and is dedicated to serving their client’s needs. This is done at EK’s expense, not the client’s, again, with a focus on quality, performance, and collaboration.
Though we’ve embraced remote and hybrid work in a post-Covid world, we’ve also found greater community at our headquarters, as more and more team members choose to spend more time in the office. Bucking the industry trend, we’re taking on more office space and building it out to suit a hybrid workforce, while still creating a range of spaces for in-person collaboration and celebration. This was partly made necessary by the fact that we brought in our largest class of new college and university hires ever and will continue that in 2025. Our investment in individuals at the beginning of their careers continues to reap dividends, infusing EK with new ideas and energy, and is another facet of our commitment to the community and the industry.
Partnership – We partner with our clients, building meaningful relationships founded on a sustained commitment to mutual success.
With our clients, our industry, and our community, we’ve continued our commitment to partnership and impact. I’ve already shared in the previous sections the greatest outcome of our spirit of partnership with our clients. They choose to remain with us year after year, returning to seek our help, re-engaging on new initiatives, and seeking our guidance on their latest challenges. We’ve cheered on clients as they’ve been promoted or taken on new opportunities, and it is the greatest compliment we could ask for that even when they move organizations, they choose to bring EK along with them.
As our clients have consistently placed trust in us and treated us as partners, we’ve also sought ways to partner with the community of which we’re a part. This past year, EK sponsored over a dozen different conferences. I was particularly proud to have EK sign up as the first sponsor for the new Knowledge Summit in Dublin, once again showcasing our willingness to put money back into the industry and help fill gaps.
We also engaged with our community philanthropically. Notably, we continued our long-standing support for the Wolf Trap Institute for Early Learning Through the Arts, helping to ensure that kids in our area will have access to arts and music education. Through our annual Know Shave Knowvember, we had our own employees choose the causes that matter most to them, making donations to a broad array of local, national, and global organizations selected by our team members. With our paid volunteer time benefit, still other teams at EK were free to volunteer their time, supporting, amongst others, some of the DC area’s soup kitchens. This is a great example of something that’s good for EK, good for our team members, and good for the community. In 2025, we’ll continue to seek opportunities for partnership at all of these levels.
Integration – We provide our customers with the full range of EK’s expertise, integrating all of our services and resources to ensure the most significant business value.
The guiding principle of integration has continued to take on greater meaning for us and our clients, in a way becoming a description of what EK delivers, not just what we do. We founded EK with the goal of being the world’s largest and most recognized provider of Knowledge Management services. We’ve achieved that, and have also become much more by fulfilling every organization’s goal of integrating their knowledge assets, regardless of type, location, form, or repository. This is the merging of Knowledge Management, Data Management, Information Management, and Content Management via the Semantic Layer and Artificial Intelligence. It is where we lead, where we’re seeing the greatest growth, and where we’re making the most impact for our clients.
One of the great outcomes of this integration of services is growth not just for EK as a whole, but for our average project size, which grew a whopping forty percent over the last year. With this growth has come greater project complexity, which we’ve risen to address via the new Project Management Office, new standards, and new positions. We’ve relied on EK’s consistent culture of community and kindness, asking thought leaders in each of these disparate fields to come together and learn from each other. I don’t believe we would have been successful scaling as gracefully as we’ve done without the foundation of our culture to drive that collaboration. As a result, we’ve smashed together disparate fields to create something new, and far more valuable than its collective parts.
Overall, this new approach to integrated services and delivery of organization-shifting solutions has resulted in greater maturity for us, as we’ve rapidly grown from startup, to scaleup, to a fully realized and enterprise-ready organization in just a decade, and are now helping a retinue of the world’s largest and most recognizable brands to transform their organizations.
Energy – We share our enthusiasm with our clients and colleagues, leveraging our excitement to achieve meaningful change.
With consistent, yet extraordinary growth, new, larger projects, and new ways to deliver for the enterprise, I am carrying a great deal of energy and excitement into the year. More importantly, I’m seeing this same energy and excitement mirrored by individuals at all levels of EK in a way that feels fresh, and actually reminiscent of our early days as a startup. We have more exciting announcements to share as the year comes into focus, so keep following along as we set the conversation, deliver for the enterprise, and integrate everything we have, for everything you need.
On behalf of Enterprise Knowledge, Happy New Year and best wishes for 2025!