Why AEC Firms Must Capture Critical Knowledge to Grow and Win Work

I want to talk about is how you can use this information to connect the business development functions to really know how to grow the firm. Right. Because we're all about helping firms do things smarter, more efficiently. But it's all in the spirit of chasing projects, chasing clients and winning work. And that all comes down to having good information to help with business development. So maybe talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, I mean, I'm glad you, you framed it that way because it can let me make a bigger point about knowledge management to start, which is information management is a piece of it. In fact, you know, I put a periodic table together of knowledge management elements that I shared in 2016. I recently updated and shared at our conference this year. So like one of the families of elements is around information management. So it's CRM and digital asset management and intranets and all those kind of things. But there are way more things that go into it than that. So you know, there's thought leadership, right? There's what we call communities of practice inside an organization to share knowledge. There's research and development, there's learning and development and mentorship. Like there's a bunch of other things that happen inside a firm that are that we consider knowledge management. And so if I kind of start with marketing and business development at the most high level version of it, meaning how do we position our company to win work? How do we differentiate our firm? And let's say that we have a subject matter expert that can deliver this really hot in demand. I'm just going to make something up. Ambulatory care, right? Let's just pretend like that is the hottest thing. It's impossible to find people who can do ambulatory care. And there's a line out the door waiting to hire your firm because of this expert. From a marketing perspective, if you don't do knowledge management and you don't help that expert transfer what they know to other emerging professionals or what we call nexperts within the organization. You're just limiting your capacity to grow as an organization. You're always going to be bottlenecked by that person and God forbid they leave the company and go to your competitor. Right? So from a strategic positioning of your business, you need to be investing in knowledge and learning and development to help grow your capacity, especially in those kind of high demand, what we call critical knowledge areas of your company.