Enterprise Knowledge co-founders Zach Wahl, CEO, and Joe Hilger, COO, have announced the upcoming release of their new book, titled Making Knowledge Management Clickable: Knowledge Management Systems Strategy, Design, and Implementation, published by Springer.
The book is a comprehensive manual for knowledge management transformations. Divided into three sections, the book first details how to analyze your organization’s KM needs, develop a business plan, establish a target state vision, and construct an actionable transformation plan. The second section of the book details the full slate of KM technologies that often comprise key elements of the KM transformation, including content and document management, enterprise search, graph databases, and taxonomy/ontology management tools. The last third of the book covers best practices for running the KM transformations, approaches for effective design and implementation, and key business outcomes and solutions that such a KM transformation may yield.
In its entirety, the book is the culmination of Wahl and Hilger’s careers, all the knowledge they’ve gained, and all that they’ve leveraged in order to make EK the largest dedicated knowledge management consultancy in the world. The book includes EK’s complete KM Proprietary Benchmark, released for the first time in this form.
Slated for publication in March, the book is presently available for pre-order on Amazon as well as other leading publishers.
“This book has been an incredible effort, but one of EK’s guiding principles is thought leadership. For Joe and me, this book is a continuation of our promise to lead the field, and guide its evolution and focus on business value,” said Wahl. Hilger added, “We noted a major gap in the literature around KM, where there just wasn’t enough consideration for KM technologies and how to make them really work for the business. This book fills that gap, and does a lot more in the process.”
“Springer is very happy to publish this book, because we feel it has the potential to fill the gap between mere scientific books which too often lack precise recommendations for industry practitioners and lightweight professional books which (again too often) are just an anecdotic list of euphemistically called best practices. This book unites the best of two worlds: it combines sound scientific knowledge with the authors’ long experience in the field,” added Ralf Gerstner, Executive Editor at Springer.
From the Publisher:
This book bridges the gap between knowledge management and technology. It embraces 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. Whether your intent is to design and implement a single technology or a complete collection of KM systems, this book provides the foundations necessary for success. It will help you understand your organization’s needs and opportunities, strategize and prioritize features and functions, design with the end user in mind, and finally build a system that your users will embrace and which will realize meaningful business value for your organization.
The book is the culmination of the authors’ collective careers, a combined sixty years of experience doing exactly what is detailed in this book. Their guidance has been honed by their own successes and failures as well as many others they have researched in order to provide a comprehensive study on KM transformations and the technologies that help to enable them. They have successfully applied this knowledge as the founders and leaders of the world’s largest dedicated knowledge management consultancy, which runs these projects for many of the world’s most complex organizations. They are writing as practitioners directly to other practitioners with the intent to enable them to apply and benefit from their knowledge and experience.
“Compelling reading for KM practitioners looking to ensure their technology decisions support their business and organizational objectives.”
-Margot Brown, Director of Knowledge Management, World Bank Group
“We are two years into our KM Transformation and if I’d had this book beforehand, it would have made the journey smoother and faster! This is a great playbook for how to plan, organize, and execute a KM transformation.”
-Stephanie Hill, Senior Director, Global Customer Services, PayPal
About the Authors:
Joseph (Joe) Hilger has over thirty years of experience leading and implementing cutting-edge, enterprise-scale IT projects. He has worked with an array of commercial and government clients in a wide range of industries. He was an early pioneer in the use of agile techniques for knowledge management systems design, implementation, and integrations projects. Joe is an expert in implementing enterprise-scale content, search, and data analytics solutions. He consults on these areas with organizations across the world and is a frequent speaker and instructor on topics including enterprise search, enterprise content management, agile development, and knowledge graphs.
Zachary (Zach) Wahl has over twenty years of experience leading programs in the knowledge and information management space. He has worked with more than 200 public and private organizations in over forty countries to successfully strategize, design, and implement knowledge management systems of various types. Zach has developed his own taxonomy design methodology, has authored a series of courses on knowledge management, and is a frequent speaker and trainer on information governance, knowledge management strategy, and taxonomy design.
Joe and Zach founded Enterprise Knowledge (EK) in 2013 and presently serve as COO and CEO respectively. EK has been listed on the Inc. 5000 List of Fastest Growing Companies in the US every year from 2018 to 2021. EK is now the world’s largest dedicated knowledge management consultancy, having won a myriad of awards.