Building the Business Case for Knowledge Management at State DOTs.

About the Client

The mission of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) is to provide independent, trustworthy advice on complex challenges by mobilizing expertise across science, engineering, and medicine. The Transportation Research Board (TRB), one of NASEM’s major divisions, administers the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP), created in 1962 and jointly run with the Federal Highway Administration and AASHTO, letting state DOTs pool research funding to solve shared problems without duplicating effort. In 2023, NCHRP received $54 million in research and administrative funding and launched about 100 new projects.

Industry Context

Nearly 40% of most state DOT workforces are eligible for retirement within a few years, threatening to take substantial institutional knowledge with them just as DOTs face growing pressure for interdisciplinary collaboration and faster knowledge transfer. NCHRP had already funded a cluster of parallel KM research efforts addressing this gap, including projects on implementation strategies and knowledge-capture toolkits. This project targeted a specific missing piece: giving DOT leadership the tools and evidence to justify actually investing in KM programs, since good ideas rarely survive budget season without a credible business case.

Current Situation

In January 2022, NCHRP released a request for proposals for research titled Assessing and Measuring the Business Value of Knowledge Management. Iknow submitted a proposal in March 2022, and after a competitive procurement process, NCHRP awarded the contract to Iknow in June 2023, based on Iknow’s long history in the KM field and its experience serving leading organizations worldwide. The project’s scope was later expanded to include developing business cases to support KM investment decisions, and the project was renamed the KM Business Case Guide.

• A looming knowledge-loss crisis. Roughly 40% of most state DOT workforces are eligible for retirement within a few years, threatening to take institutional knowledge with them.
• No standard way to measure KM’s business value. State DOTs lacked established assessment and measurement methods connecting KM investment to measurable organizational outcomes.
• Limited leadership understanding. DOT leadership often didn’t clearly see how KM connected to other organizational practices, making it difficult to prioritize funding.
• No shared guidance on organizational placement. States had no common reference for where a KM program should sit within their organizational structure, or how to build the internal partnerships that support it.

• Develop KM assessment and measurement methods relevant to state DOT business practices.
• Improve agency leadership’s understanding of KM’s connections to other organizational practices.
• Identify options for placement of KM programs within organizational structures.
• Foster internal partnerships that support knowledge retention, sharing, and development.
• Develop business cases to support KM investment decisions (added scope).

How Iknow Structured the Work

Iknow followed NASEM’s rigorous, standardized research methodology — an Amplified Research Plan, interim Technical Memorandums, preliminary draft reports, and a Final Report, with monthly and quarterly progress reports and kickoff and interim meetings — organized into three phases and nine workstreams: secondary research, primary research, and final research products.

Key Activities & Decisions

• Amplified Research Plan. Iknow expanded and refined the work plan submitted in its original proposal.
• Literature review. Iknow reviewed more than 180 published articles and wrote synopses of 49 relevant to the project’s four research topics, drawing on transportation-focused sources like NCHRP reports and DOT resources, KM-focused sources including APQC, KMWorld, AIIM, and the ACM Digital Library, and general academic and research-focused sources.
• Stakeholder engagement. Iknow interviewed state DOT KM leads from 27 states and the District of Columbia in one-hour interviews following a standard guide, preparing written summaries to capture each conversation’s insights.
• Stakeholder focus groups. Iknow convened focus groups to review drafts of the Guide and incorporated stakeholder feedback into the final report and other deliverables.
• Final report and deliverables. Iknow drafted the Final Report — published as NCHRP Research Report 1164, The Business Case for Knowledge Management: A Guide — along with outreach materials, an implementation plan, a summary presentation, and a required Conduct of Research Report documenting the research effort itself.
• Guide content. The final Guide included recommendations on KM governance, roles and responsibilities, a sample implementation schedule, a RACI matrix, and detailed coverage of more than 15 tacit knowledge transfer approaches, including boot camps, best-practices studies, communities of practice, critical incident reviews, expert storytelling, and knowledge fairs.

Stakeholders & Collaboration

Iknow served as prime contractor to NCHRP under NASEM and TRB oversight, working with an NCHRP research panel throughout the project while interviewing KM leads across 27 states and the District of Columbia and convening focus groups to validate draft content before publication.

Synthesizing a Large, Scattered Literature Into Something Usable

More than 180 published articles spanning transportation, KM, and academic sources risked producing an unwieldy bibliography rather than an actionable resource. Iknow addressed this by screening the full set and distilling 49 articles into structured synopses tied directly to the project’s four research topics, so every piece of secondary research had a clear line back to a specific guidebook need.

Ensuring the Guide Would Resonate With the People Who’d Use It

A guide built purely from literature and the research team’s own judgment risked missing how DOT KM leads actually experienced these challenges day to day. Iknow addressed this by combining structured one-hour interviews with KM leads from 27 states and the District of Columbia with stakeholder focus groups reviewing draft content, so the Guide reflected real practitioner input rather than research assumptions alone before final publication.

Quantitative Outcomes

• Literature reviewed: 180+ published articles reviewed, with 49 synopses written.
• Stakeholder interviews: KM leads from 27 states and the District of Columbia.
• Deliverables: 14 primary deliverables and more than 27 additional outputs across nine workstreams.

Qualitative Outcomes

The research culminated in NCHRP Research Report 1164, The Business Case for Knowledge Management: A Guide, published by the National Academies alongside a companion technical document, NCHRP Web-Only Document 437, detailing the research effort. The Guide gives all 50 state DOTs a shared, validated resource for building the business case for future KM investment, complete with governance recommendations, a sample implementation schedule, a RACI matrix, and more than 15 documented tacit knowledge transfer approaches. The project also fits into a broader, coordinated wave of NCHRP-funded KM research launched around the same time, positioning Iknow’s Guide as a foundational resource that concurrent research efforts on KM implementation and knowledge capture could build on.

Timeline to Impact

Iknow conducted the research over 24 months, delivering the Final Report and supporting deliverables on NASEM’s mandated two-year timeline, with the Guide published as NCHRP Research Report 1164 for immediate use by state DOTs nationwide.

Core Skills

• KM research & guidebook development
• Literature review & synthesis
• Multi-state stakeholder engagement
• Business case development

Methods & Frameworks

• NASEM/TRB research methodology (Amplified Research Plan, Technical Memorandums, Final Report)
• Structured literature review and synopsis writing
• Standardized one-hour stakeholder interviews
• Stakeholder focus groups

Technologies & Tools

• APQC KM frameworks and ACM Digital Library research resources
• RACI matrix and implementation schedule templates