Breaking Down the Barriers to Knowledge Sharing.

About the Client

Company I had grown into one of the world’s leading research-based healthcare companies, active in more than 130 countries and operating research centers across Switzerland, the United States, Japan, and Germany. By the mid-2000s, Company I had sharpened its focus on its Pharmaceuticals and Diagnostics divisions, positioning itself as one of the world’s foremost research-oriented healthcare companies. That position depended heavily on how effectively its globally distributed R&D organization could find and reuse its own accumulated expertise.

Industry Context

Large pharmaceutical R&D organizations are inherently global and decentralized, with researchers spread across countries and research centers, making a fundamental knowledge management challenge unavoidable: ensuring scientists can quickly find both the right expert and the right prior work before investing time and budget in research that may have already been done elsewhere. In an industry where R&D productivity and intellectual property both hinge on avoiding redundant effort, that challenge carries real commercial weight. By the mid-2000s, expertise-location and enterprise portal technology were maturing enough to give large research organizations genuine alternatives to informal, relationship-based expert-finding. But the broader industry experience of the era also showed that technology alone rarely solved the problem, since building a genuine knowledge-sharing culture required addressing organizational incentives and behavior as much as software.

Current Situation

Company I’s executives wanted a culture that would more readily collaborate, share knowledge, and recognize and reward knowledge-sharing behaviors, and launched a knowledge-sharing initiative to make that vision real. Company I asked Iknow to assist with two elements of that initiative: identifying the organizational and behavioral roadblocks standing in the way of a knowledge-sharing culture, and recommending the software tools that could enable the new knowledge-sharing environment once those roadblocks were understood.

• Difficulty finding the right experts. R&D staff across a large, geographically distributed research organization struggled to quickly find recognized experts who had already addressed the same or similar issues.
• Fragmented content across multiple repositories. Relevant R&D content was scattered across multiple repositories, making it difficult to find quickly with existing search capabilities.
• Disconnected, unmeasured local initiatives. Numerous internal, disparate knowledge-sharing projects existed without any common platform for encouraging collaboration or measuring their effectiveness.
• Unclear organizational and behavioral roadblocks. Beyond technology gaps, Company I needed to understand the organizational and behavioral roadblocks standing in the way of a genuine knowledge-sharing culture.

• Define business requirements for improving access to experts and R&D content.
• Identify the organizational and behavioral roadblocks to instilling a knowledge-sharing culture.
• Evaluate and recommend commercial software packages to enable the new knowledge-sharing environment.
• Deliver a high-level design document and implementation roadmap to guide the broader initiative.

How Iknow Structured the Work

Iknow structured the engagement around two parallel workstreams — defining business requirements through direct stakeholder interviews, and evaluating commercial technology against those requirements — reflecting Iknow’s KM strategy and platform selection methodology for pairing organizational diagnosis with a vendor-neutral technology recommendation.

Key Activities & Decisions

• Requirements definition and stakeholder interviews. Iknow defined specific business requirements regarding access to experts and content, and conducted extensive interviews across Europe and the United States.
• Future-state requirements summary. Iknow delivered detailed interview findings and a future-state requirements summary covering business requirements, content and content architecture requirements, functional requirements, and organizational, governance, and change management requirements.
• Success-factor benchmarking. Iknow outlined other characteristics of successful knowledge-management program implementations to ground Company I’s initiative in proven practice.
• Technology requirements matching. Iknow analyzed the functional requirements and matched them to commercially available technologies, developing selection criteria for knowledge-sharing solutions.
• Software vendor evaluation and recommendations. Iknow evaluated and recommended specific software packages, with technology recommendations focused on an expertise and learning portal, an author/expert contribution portal, a content management system, and advanced search and content discovery tools.
• Design document and roadmap. Iknow created a high-level design document and an implementation roadmap to guide the initiative forward.

Stakeholders & Collaboration

Iknow served as prime contractor, working directly with Company I’s R&D leadership across its worldwide research organization and engaging staff across Europe and the United States throughout the interview and requirements process.

Diagnosing Organizational Roadblocks Across a Global Research Organization

Understanding why knowledge sharing wasn’t happening required more than a technology audit — it required surfacing genuine organizational and behavioral barriers across a research organization spread across continents. Iknow addressed this by conducting extensive interviews in both Europe and the United States and building a future-state requirements summary that explicitly covered organizational, governance, and change management requirements alongside technical ones, not just a list of desired software features.

Selecting the Right Technology From an Immature, Crowded Market

Knowledge-sharing and collaboration software spanned a wide and still-maturing vendor landscape, creating real risk of recommending familiar or trendy tools that didn’t actually fit Company I’s specific requirements. Iknow addressed this by first analyzing functional requirements and developing explicit selection criteria before evaluating any vendor, ensuring the resulting software recommendations were matched to Company I’s actual needs rather than driven by market visibility.

Quantitative Outcomes

• Stakeholder engagement: Extensive stakeholder interviews conducted across Europe and the United States.
• Requirements framework delivered: A future-state requirements summary spanning four requirement categories: business, content and architecture, functional, and organizational/governance/change management.
• Technology recommendations delivered: Software recommendations delivered across four technology categories: expertise and learning portal, author/expert contribution portal, content management system, and advanced search and content discovery.
• Engagement duration: Three-month assignment.

Qualitative Outcomes

Company I’s senior executives understood that this initiative would provide the foundation for transforming the R&D organization into a knowledge-sharing environment, with tangible benefits including streamlined decision-making through faster access to experts and expertise, increased productivity from reduced rework and less time spent locating data and documents, and higher-quality R&D outputs. The company used the outputs from this project to guide its broader knowledge-sharing initiative, direct evidence the engagement produced a genuinely actionable foundation rather than a report that sat on a shelf.

Timeline to Impact

Iknow delivered the full requirements summary, organizational findings, technology recommendations, design document, and implementation roadmap within the three-month engagement, giving Company I’s R&D leadership a ready foundation to guide its knowledge-sharing initiative going forward.

Core Skills

• KM strategy and governance design
• KM platform and vendor selection
• Communities of practice and expertise-location design
• Organizational and behavioral change diagnosis

Methods & Frameworks

• Multi-region stakeholder interviews
• Requirements-to-technology matching
• Vendor-neutral software evaluation criteria

Technologies & Tools

• Expertise and learning portals; author/expert contribution portals
• Content management systems; advanced search and content discovery tools