An AEC CEO’s Advice on Starting a Knowledge Management Program From Scratch

I'm curious, Alan. Like we were in 2025. You and I have been working together for almost a decade. Your knowledge management journey's taken the company from 60 to 250. You didn't have all these departments, you didn't have digital practice. You didn't have a director of knowledge management. Like, none of these things when we first met. So if I'm a firm that's coming new to this, doesn't use the word knowledge management in my firm, whatever it is, what have you learned that you could tell 2017 Ellen, and if you could just do it, you know. Yeah. And if you could just compress it down, make it simple, make it clear, start with the why.

Yeah, I. I totally can because I talk about it all the time and you, you. It can be overwhelming. All of this can be overwhelming. And what, what, you know, what I did, right. Is what I'm proud of in terms of starting with one. Just like start with one if you want to start, you know, getting into cam, get one person. Don't get 20% of five people. Get one person. Take that chance. Make the case to your leadership that 20% of five people isn't going to give you the result that you need. Right. I started with one person in digital. What I would absolutely tell 2017 Ellen and 2018 Ellen and 2019 Ellen is build ops teams. Earlier, Right. We were such a close. Awesome small studio. We just thought. I thought I could do everything. We could do everything and we could just keep doing it. We should have started putting more of this in place earlier.

How did you know when it was time to do it? Like, what broke?

Oh, when we. When we just. There was too many people. There was just too many people. You could not get anything out to all of those people. Like, without hr. Right. Problems started, you know, mounting. Thank goodness. I thought about it just before the pandemic. But even with technology without a cto, it was just pieces. Right. At that point, I was ready to have somebody pull it together and grateful that I did it when I did it, because I talked to a lot of companies now who haven't gone down this path and they're overwhelmed. How do I even start? And what I find fascinating, I was doing it out of one location. I have. I have a few people in Halifax, but when you have multiple locations with people.

Yeah.

It's even that much more important to get this foundation in, because at the end of the day, I still can also walk over there and ask somebody a question. But if I'm in a different state or country, I can't do that. So 2017, I want to start earlier and start small.

So it's kind of the, you know, you don't build your foundation on sand, build it on rock. Right. So whether it's a data foundation or a knowledge foundation or a operational team foundation, you would have tried to focus on making sure the building was on a good footing earlier.

And because for people that don't have the ability to have both roles and people that have to present a case to a financial leader, like, figure out the case and make it real and ask for the opportunity to try. Right.