Catching Up to the Giants: Building a Knowledge Management Foundation for a Top-10 Accounting Firm.

About the Client

Company AE is among the top accounting firms in the United States.

Industry Context

Leading professional services firms have invested in knowledge management for more than two decades, recognizing institutional knowledge as a genuine competitive asset in an expertise-driven business. In an industry where the largest firms generate hundreds of billions in combined annual revenue and compete heavily on client relationships and accumulated know-how, a firm without formal KM infrastructure faces real costs: younger staff can’t find the right subject-matter expert, cross-selling across service lines suffers, and past work gets redone rather than reused. Despite its top-10 scale, Company AE had fallen behind that pack.

Current Situation

Company AE’s business operations and infrastructure didn’t support knowledge capture or sharing, and work was performed with limited exchange among its five client-facing service lines. The firm also lacked an enterprise search tool that indexed content and returned accurate results. In the mid-2020s, the firm and Iknow developed a statement of work for an initial project to build the KM foundation. Company AE’s IT Services unit, with executive sponsorship from the Chief Culture Officer, launched the companywide KM program, with this engagement as its first project.

• No formal KM program despite top-10 scale. Company AE’s infrastructure didn’t support knowledge capture, sharing, or other KM activities, leaving the firm roughly two decades behind peer audit, tax, and consulting firms in KM investment.
• Deep organizational silos. Work was performed with limited or no exchange among Company AE’s five client-facing service lines.
• Undocumented intellectual capital. The firm’s collective expertise wasn’t captured or systematically organized anywhere.
• A search tool that didn’t work. Company AE lacked an enterprise search tool capable of indexing the firm’s content and delivering accurate results, undermining the goal of having a single place where employees could reliably find current information.

• Define a KM future-state vision, strategy, and implementation roadmap to institutionalize KM across the firm.
• Identify Company AE’s content and knowledge assets and build the semantic foundation for enterprise search.
• Strengthen Company AE’s internal KM knowledge and capabilities through training and knowledge transfer.

How Iknow Structured the Work

Iknow structured the nine-month engagement into three parallel stages — KM strategy and roadmap, enterprise search foundation, and KM skills development — spanning nine workstreams and producing 22 primary deliverables and deliverable categories.

Key Activities & Decisions

• Current-state assessment. Iknow interviewed 80 Company AE employees — more than 75% of whom were Directors or Partners — using tailored guides across five client-facing service lines, administrative functions, and senior management, followed by a second round of interviews to drive follow-up action items.
• Gap analysis and benchmarking. Interviews identified four core gaps: intranet findability, junior staff struggling to locate subject matter experts, difficulty cross-selling the firm’s broad service portfolio, and missing KM policies and processes. Iknow benchmarked practices through interviews with seven industry peers, the IMF, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the World Bank, and five software vendors.
• KM strategy development. Iknow developed a comprehensive KM strategy for Company AE, including a business case for investment, vision and mission statements, core strategy components, and recommended change management activities — leadership support, internal communications, broad employee involvement, and short-term wins.
• Recommendations and roadmap. Iknow developed 26 specific recommendations, grouped into the categories of KM Leadership and Foundational Elements, Information Technology, Human Resources, and Content Creation, and identified 25 potential projects for a 12-to-18-month implementation roadmap that balanced infrastructure build-out with quick, high-value wins.
• Content and technology assessment. Iknow audited roughly 190 million documents across Company AE’s disparate content repositories and assessed the IT systems and infrastructure relevant to launching enterprise KM, finding no defined content strategy and content governance largely handled informally by IT.
• Taxonomy development. Iknow built an enterprise taxonomy with 11 facets, three lists, and about 3,200 terms with synonyms and ontology links, drawing on Company AE’s shared-drive file structures, intranet pages, organizational structure, taxonomies embedded in systems such as ServiceNow and Workday, and a text-mining tool.
• Training and knowledge transfer. Iknow designed an eight-module KM training syllabus and delivered targeted knowledge-transfer sessions, including one for Company AE’s IT staff covering Microsoft Search, SharePoint Search, Teams sites, and Progress Semaphore, and another that demystified taxonomies and faceted metadata for a broader audience.

Stakeholders & Collaboration

Iknow served as prime contractor under the executive sponsorship of Company AE’s Chief Culture Officer, working with the firm’s IT Services unit, and engaging 80 employees directly, plus counterparts at more than a dozen external organizations through the benchmarking workstream.

Assessing a Large, Siloed Firm Without Slowing the Project Down

With more than 9,000 employees across five service lines and administrative functions, a generic assessment approach risked overlooking function-specific gaps in each part of the firm. Iknow addressed this by using tailored interview guides for each service line, administrative functions, and senior management, conducting 80 structured interviews — more than 75% with Directors or Partners — plus a follow-up round, turning a huge, siloed organization into a single, structured, comparable dataset within nine months.

Making 190 Million Documents and 26 Recommendations Actionable

A firm of Company AE’s size could easily have been left with an overwhelming list of findings and no clear place to start. Iknow addressed this by grouping recommendations into four clear categories and building a prioritized, phased 25-project roadmap that explicitly separated quick, high-value wins from longer-term infrastructure work, giving Company AE an executable sequence rather than an undifferentiated list.

Quantitative Outcomes

• Deliverables: 22 primary deliverables and deliverable categories across nine workstreams.
• Stakeholder engagement: 80 employee interviews across two rounds, plus benchmarking interviews with 10+ peer organizations and five software vendors.
• Content scale addressed: Approximately 190 million documents audited across disparate repositories.
• Taxonomy: 11 facets, 3 lists, and about 3,200 terms with synonyms and ontology links.
• Recommendations and roadmap: 26 recommendations and 25 roadmap projects within a 12- to 18-month program.

Qualitative Outcomes

Company AE began implementing Iknow’s recommendations immediately: establishing new governance policies and an organizational structure to manage firm knowledge, creating new KM position descriptions and hiring KM staff, and launching technology projects spanning intranet redesign, enterprise search enhancement, data management, content management, and content autoclassification. The enterprise taxonomy Iknow built became the foundation for a subsequent autoclassification implementation using Progress Semaphore, as documented in a later engagement — direct evidence that the strategy moved quickly into execution rather than sitting on the shelf. Company AE progressed from having no formal KM function to a companywide program under executive sponsorship, closing a gap that had persisted relative to its top-tier peers for roughly two decades.

Timeline to Impact

Iknow delivered the full nine-workstream engagement within nine months, with Company AE moving into implementation immediately after the engagement’s close.

Core Skills

• Enterprise KM strategy & roadmap development
• Taxonomy & content governance
• Organizational benchmarking
• KM training & change management

Methods & Frameworks

• Structured multi-level stakeholder interviews
• External benchmarking (primary and secondary research)
• Enterprise content and knowledge auditing
• Faceted taxonomy design with text mining

Technologies & Tools

• Progress Semaphore
• Microsoft Search and SharePoint Online
• ServiceNow and Workday taxonomy inputs