This content was created by Christopher Parsons. This content was uploaded by Christopher Parsons. This is a YouTube video titled "How KM Solves the Real Problems AEC Firms Care About" created on October 7, 2025. It features a conversation between an unidentified speaker and Christopher Parsons discussing how knowledge management can address business challenges such as differentiation, quality, and employee engagement in AEC firms.
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Firm principals, if you know, if they're asked what their top five problems are in their firm or their top three problems, I doubt they would literally say knowledge management or data. They might say something more like we need to win more work or we need to differentiate ourselves in the marketplace. How would what you do with knowledge management relate to those things?
Yeah, I think that's great. So just finish your thought. Right? So we need to win more work, we need to differentiate ourselves, we need to do better design, we have quality issues, we have recruiting issues, we have employee engagement issues. We want to do some research and development. So whatever that business problem that the CEO or the executive partners wake up and think about, the best knowledge managers I know are connected to that thing, right? And then you work backwards from that and you say like, well, what's the underlying knowledge problem that's preventing us from doing that thing you want to do? So for example, if you want to, well, we have a client I'm going to, I can think of who historically did kind of like some sustainability work, but they weren't considered a leader in sustainability, but they wanted to be, right. They thought that was in their kind of 10 year strategy. Like we want to differentiate on sustainability and climate and health and all that kind of stuff. So they needed to bring in outside experts because they didn't have the knowledge. They needed to differentiate credibly. That person needed to educate the workforce and teach, teach them how to do sustainability and embed it into the project versus having it be this side thing that you hire a consultant for. It's kind of an afterthought. So like in that case, like to be competitive, they felt they needed new knowledge. You have to acquire it. In another case it might be, look, we do this really specialized form of, I don't know, healthcare architecture. I'm not thinking of a good example, but let's just pretend there's a specialized vector there and the person that knows how to do it, we've only got one of them. So we're at risk. That's what you call critical knowledge. Like we only have one senior expert, they know how to do it and they're like a couple years away from retirement maybe. So like this whole thing, like we win work because of this, differentiate expertise, but that knowledge is at risk. So then how do we transfer that to the next generation? How do we scale that knowledge so we can do more of those projects and then maybe they decide to stay another 10 years and it's not, it doesn't turn out to be a thing. So. And then you can get follow the line into quality or some of the other challenges or engagement. There's always a question of does our firm have the knowledge we need and how could we make better use of the knowledge we have, usually connected to any business problem that you can come up with.
