The Challenge

A global development firm with thousands of employees and projects across the world was struggling with their content management strategy. Specifically, they were dealing with inefficient processes and outdated technology. This resulted in wasted time and frustration from staff, oftentimes struggling to find the right information in low bandwidth countries.

This global development firm has done work in over 150 countries worldwide. As part of this work, they have specific documentation that is nearly identical for each project, with only slight differences. As such, the organization had many different versions of the same document. Not only was the client using outdated technology to create, disseminate, and manage/update this documentation, but they also struggled with inefficiencies in how they make and apply changes to these project-specific materials.

These inefficiencies resulted in a large amount of work, done mostly by home-office employees to curate, distribute, and update project documentation to the appropriate project teams. Whenever changes needed to be made, home-office employees needed to make the same change to every single instance of the document. As a result, there was a significant amount of duplication in efforts, error-prone processes, and frustrated employees struggling to maintain the integrity of the firms’ content. In addition, field staff around the world frequently expressed frustration and dissatisfaction with the outdated software they were using to access documentation, as a recent effort to implement new technology had been unsuccessful.

The client organization was seeking third-party support with the replatforming of the content management system used to maintain their project documentation. The client sought the services of a consultant (or team of consultants) to perform an analysis of their current system/s, develop a set of system requirements tailored to their use case, and recommend a set of solutions that addressed their needs.

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.