From Strategy to Scale: Building the Technology Backbone for Company T’s Global Knowledge Management Program.

About the Client

Company T pioneered the biotechnology industry and remains one of the world’s most productive pharmaceutical research organizations. Company T’s pharmaceutical engineering function — responsible for designing, constructing, and validating biologics manufacturing facilities — was in the midst of integrating with its parent company’s global engineering organization, with the goals of sharing expertise, continuously improving their processes, and operating as a single, unified organization.

Industry Context

Enterprise search and knowledge management technology have undergone a dramatic transformation since this engagement. In 2012, federated search platforms like the Google Search Appliance represented the state of the art — a single query surfacing results from multiple, disconnected repositories such as LiveLink, Documentum, and SharePoint. Today, that same foundational challenge — connecting scattered enterprise content into a single, trustworthy access layer — sits at the center of the generative AI era. Industry analysts now describe AI-powered, permission-aware retrieval as a near-mandatory capability for large enterprises. The content architecture, metadata, taxonomy, and information-access discipline Iknow built for Company T in 2012 reflects the same underlying principle that now underpins retrieval-augmented AI: well-governed, well-structured content is what makes any search or AI system trustworthy.

Current Situation

With the 2011 strategy, process redesign, and governance framework in place, pharmaceutical engineering teams still lacked the actual systems needed to find each other’s expertise, search across fragmented document repositories, or collaborate on shared technical problems. Company T did not have this specialized KM implementation capability in-house and engaged Iknow to lead the design, build, and rollout of the enabling technologies.

• Fragmented content repositories. Engineering knowledge was scattered across LiveLink, Documentum, ShareWeb, and SharePoint, with no single way for engineers to search across all of them at once.
• No mechanism to locate expertise. Pharmaceutical engineering had no system for identifying which colleague, in which location, held knowledge relevant to a given engineering problem — a particular liability for a newly merged, globally dispersed organization.
• Underused collaboration channels. Engineers lacked a structured way to ask questions and share answers electronically, as well as dedicated project sites where distributed teams could collaborate on quality, maintenance, manufacturing, and change management work.
• Cross-border privacy complexity. Any system that surfaced information about individual engineers’ expertise had to satisfy the differing privacy requirements of every country in which the company operated.

• Deliver a working federated search capability spanning pharmaceutical engineering’s major document management and collaboration systems, with a three-year implementation roadmap.
• Build a global questions-and-answers application enabling engineers to exchange knowledge electronically, with metrics to monitor adoption and impact.
• Design and implement an expertise location system that respects opt-in/opt-out preferences and complies with multi-country privacy requirements.
• Deliver working SharePoint knowledge management pilots for priority engineering teams, and train those teams to use KM to accelerate problem-solving.

How Iknow Structured the Work

Iknow organized the 2012 program around four parallel workstreams, each carried through a consistent implementation methodology: requirements collection and use-case development, rapid design sessions and wireframing, conference room pilots to validate designs with real users before build-out, and phased rollout supported by metrics to track adoption.

Key Activities & Decisions

• Federated Search Engine. Iknow delivered a proof-of-concept federated search engine using the Google Search Appliance across LiveLink, Documentum, ShareWeb, and SharePoint, developed use cases and search scenarios, completed the metadata schema and taxonomy the search engine required, and produced a three-year search implementation roadmap along with full requirements documentation for the search engine and its knowledge-access portal.
• Global Questions & Answers Application. Iknow gathered use cases, scenarios, and requirements for a global Q&A application, selected Microsoft SharePoint as the development environment, built the application, and developed metrics and reporting to monitor engineer participation and impact.
• Expertise Location System. Iknow built the business case for expertise location, gathered requirements and example search scenarios, researched privacy requirements across every country in which its Swiss parent company operated, designed opt-in/opt-out mechanisms for engineers, and selected SharePoint Profiles as the platform for sharing expertise biographies.
• Knowledge Management Pilots. Iknow developed working SharePoint site pilots covering quality improvement, maintenance, manufacturing practices, change management, and capital-project equipment knowledge; trained client teams on using KM to accelerate problem-solving; and quantified each pilot’s impact through user satisfaction, contribution volume, and usage metrics.

Stakeholders & Collaboration

Iknow worked directly with pharmaceutical engineering leadership and the pilot teams themselves, as well as with the technical staff responsible for hosting the knowledge management applications and intranet websites on Company T’s internal servers. This engagement coordinated a technology build-out across two continents and two previously separate corporate IT environments.

Navigating Multi-Country Privacy Requirements

An expertise location system, by design, surfaces information about individual employees — a category of data subject to differing privacy rules across every country in which the company operated. Iknow addressed this by researching applicable privacy requirements up front and designing the system around explicit engineer opt-in and opt-out controls, ensuring the system could be deployed globally without running afoul of local data-protection expectations.

Turning Four Complex Builds into One Adopted Platform

Delivering a federated search engine, a Q&A application, an expertise location system, and multiple SharePoint pilots in parallel, across a newly merged, geographically dispersed organization, risked producing four disconnected tools rather than one coherent platform. Iknow addressed this by applying a consistent design methodology — rapid design sessions and conference room pilots — across every workstream, and by validating each system directly with the engineering teams who would use it before moving to full rollout.

Operational Outcomes

• Delivered a proof-of-concept federated search engine spanning LiveLink, Documentum, ShareWeb, and SharePoint, backed by a completed metadata schema, taxonomy, and three-year implementation roadmap.
• Built and launched a global questions-and-answers application on Microsoft SharePoint, with metrics in place to monitor engineer adoption and knowledge-sharing activity.
• Delivered a working expertise location system built on SharePoint Profiles, with privacy-compliant opt-in/opt-out controls researched and designed for every country of operation.
• Delivered several working SharePoint knowledge management pilot sites covering quality improvement, maintenance, manufacturing practices, and change management, each measured for user satisfaction, contribution volume, and usage.

Strategic and Organizational Outcomes

Company T gained specialized knowledge management implementation expertise it did not have in-house, converting the strategy and governance framework into functioning technology used by engineers across two continents. The pilot program also built the technical foundation Company T needed to scale the platform further, extending the reach of federated search, expertise location, and structured collaboration across the broader engineering organization.

Timeline to Impact

Iknow delivered all four workstreams within the 12-month engagement, with working pilots adopted by engineering teams during the year and a defined technical foundation in place to extend the platform.

Core Skills

• Knowledge management strategy & implementation
• Enterprise search advisory & deployment
• Communities of practice & expertise location design
• KM platform selection & implementation (SharePoint)

Methods & Frameworks

• Requirements collection, use cases, and search scenario development
• Rapid design sessions and conference room pilots
• Metadata and taxonomy development
• Adoption metrics and impact measurement

Technologies & Tools

• Google Search Appliance (federated search)
• Microsoft SharePoint (portals, Q&A application, SharePoint Profiles, community sites)