Why Your Intranet Should Be A Digital Twin of Your AEC Firm

All of these things are found in our knowledge base on our intranet. And so it, it really is, is fascinating how it, it just goes hand in hand and we're at the point in terms of content that it's, it's just a given. You create a new workflow, you create a new wiki page, a new piece of knowledge. You don't create anything without creating the knowledge. It's just a part of who we are and how we function as a studio.

So it's almost like a digital twin of the business. Right. So as you make a change in the analog real business, you have to keep the digital reflection of it up to date.

I love that analogy and my CTO Brent, my partner, is going to love that analogy. We were just talking about it today, but about the digital twin and data and everything. And it is, it's a digital twin of our knowledge and it's, it's, it's ever evolving.

Yep.

And I think for me, that's the other thing that I know for sure and I've realized over this journey is that you think in a moment in time, you've got it right. Right. This is great. The way we designed our wiki pages, the way we've organized our knowledge, it's awesome. Now we can just like stop thinking and move on to the next, you know, bright shiny thing. But your needs evolve and the, the needs of the knowledge and the way the knowledge is shared evolves. And that's been a really important thing as we segued from post pandemic to now 2025. And we just looked at all of our knowledge and we just realized it's not, it's not doing it, it's not written, it's not displayed, it's not stated in the way that is going to resonate with our studio members who are living in 2025. And so we are now re looking at our entire knowledge base, which is like overwhelming because you can imagine it's pretty well developed and we're redoing all of it the piece by piece.

Quick question about this kind of evolution and this something Chris said in the last time that we talked was like, knowledge is infrastructure. And then that to me kind of, if you elaborate on that, it's like, okay, well, infrastructure needs to be constantly maintained. Right. And this is kind of what you're talking about. It's like we have to keep looking at it, we have to keep going back and we have to be critical and something, another topic that kind of came up or a tangent to that is just this idea of expiration dates with certain things. I mean, it could be a lot of things, right? It's like processes, workflows, technology, tools, all that stuff. And. And so I'm just curious, how do you keep your finger on the pulse? Because like you said, it's so well developed, it seems kind of overwhelming. So it's overwhelming when you don't have the information, and then it's overwhelming when you have all of the information in there and then there's all the in between. Right. And so obviously, the incentive to me, if I. If I just had to guess is like, the value that people get out of this. That's. That's how people keep updating and keep going and like, how it actually becomes this digital twin is through this kind of. I keep getting value out of it, and I will only get value out of it if I put effort into it. And how do you just step back and get the perspective of like, okay, we need to resurvey this. We need to make sure that this is serving everybody here now and for what's coming?

Yeah, that's a great question. And it's something that, you know, I'm extraordinarily passionate about in our industry, you know, rethinking the value of operations teams. And so typically, operations teams are seen as overhead that will crush your business, and so you should keep them as lean as you possibly can. And to me, my operations teams actually form the foundation of my business to allow my designers to focus on design, because I've got a very deep people and culture. Marketing knowledge management, learning and development, digital practice. And we work together. Right? So trends that my HR team are seeing in our employee survey are letting us know where we're missing the mark in some of our communications and some of our knowledge. Our digital team is constantly coming up with new ways that we can enhance our workflows. Every time a workflow goes from one thing to another, you have to update your knowledge to stay, you know, recent with bat, our marketing strategy, like, it's all connected. And because I've got leaders in every one of those areas who are talking and sharing and thinking, and they're doing all of that together with me. That's how we know when the time to look at it is. So one of the things, you know, I've talked to Chris about this, you know, a lot, is in 2025, what's the new need? Right? The new need that we put together based on all of that information that we've received from the members in our work is people need simple, clear, intentional knowledge and they don't have time, right? It's like they got to get it. They got to get out, they got to get in. And as soon as we all realize that needs to be the focus, we started looking at our knowledge at our wiki pages and we were like, whoa, there's too many words. We might be telling them what this thing is. For example, our social media page has a definition of what is social media. Well, if they don't know what social media is, that's ridiculous. But what they don't know is what is social media to Turner Fleischer. And so putting the why into our wiki pages. So it's not just the what and the what was good. The what served its purpose. But now our studio needs the why. And once they get the why, they need to clearly and easily know the how.