Advancing the Nation’s Engineering Corps Toward Enterprise Knowledge Management Maturity.

About the Client

USACE is a major command of the U.S. Army with a dual mission: military engineering, including facilities construction and maintenance for the armed forces, and major civil works across the United States, including dams, bridges, navigation channels, and flood and water resource protection. USACE operates across all U.S. states and territories and at military installations overseas, organized into 11 geographic regions plus a dedicated research division. Although senior commanders are Army officers, the workforce is overwhelmingly civilian — a scale and structure that makes consistent, enterprise-wide knowledge management genuinely difficult to achieve.

Industry Context

USACE’s approach mirrors a pattern common across large public-sector and engineering-intensive organizations: adopting APQC’s Levels of Knowledge Management Maturity, a widely used five-step framework, to move from inconsistent, locally driven KM activity toward disciplined, enterprise-aligned practice. Level 3 on that model represents an organization with established, uniform, reliable processes for enabling the flow of knowledge — a meaningful milestone for any enterprise, but a particularly demanding one for an organization spread across 11 regions with a workforce in the tens of thousands. For agencies like USACE, where staffing and appropriations can shift from year to year, durable knowledge infrastructure is less a convenience than a hedge against the loss of institutional expertise as people and budgets change.

Current Situation

Until 2014, USACE’s knowledge management activity was driven almost entirely by local business units and regions, each developing its own goals, tools, and approaches. That decentralization produced a wide range of capabilities, standalone tools, and inefficient programs, and a meaningful amount of lost business value. USACE’s new Commander responded by installing a CKO and publishing a series of Operation Orders defining the KM program’s scope and its Lines of Effort — spanning document repositories, workflow tools, business intelligence platforms, lessons learned processes, expertise locators, and collaboration. Working with newly installed KM leaders (KMRs) in each division, the CKO’s office completed two rounds of APQC Maturity Model assessments between 2014 and mid-2017 en route to its July 2018 enterprise Level 3 goal, then engaged Iknow to help close the gap.

• A legacy of fragmented, decentralized KM. Years of independently developed local initiatives had produced inconsistent capabilities and standalone tools across USACE’s 11 regions, with a meaningful amount of institutional knowledge and business value lost in the process.
• A hard deadline against an unfamiliar external framework. 12 divisions each needed to produce a defensible, evidence-based Maturity Model submission against APQC’s criteria in time for USACE’s July 2018 enterprise Level 3 goal.
• Multiple Lines of Effort at uneven stages of readiness. Initiatives like expertise location and content/records management had progressed at different paces and needed independent expert review to determine what to prioritize next.
• No established KM training curriculum. USACE had no formal training program in place for either its roughly 37,000-person general workforce or its newly installed KMR cadre of roughly 50 to 100 core knowledge management staff.

• Support all 12 divisional KMRs and the CKO’s office in preparing rigorous, evidence-based APQC Maturity Model submissions.
• Independently assess the Expertise Location Line of Effort and deliver a recommended strategy, roadmap, and immediate next steps.
• Assess content and records management practices across USACE and recommend a concrete 18–24 month action plan.
• Develop a KM training strategy and supporting materials for both the general workforce and the KMR cadre.
• Build a reusable library of Lines of Activity to guide divisional KMRs in executing their local KM programs.

How Iknow Structured the Work

Iknow structured the five-month engagement around six parallel support areas, working directly alongside the CKO’s office and the 12 divisional KMRs, and established a disciplined joint operating rhythm to manage the breadth of the scope across a large, distributed federal team.

Key Activities & Decisions

• APQC Maturity Model Submission Support. Iknow served as subject matter expert on the APQC KM Maturity Model for all 12 KMRs, guiding data and evidence collection, reviewing draft submissions, and delivering preliminary rating assessments and gap-closing recommendations for each division — coordinating directly with APQC’s own experts throughout.
• Expertise Location LOE Review. Iknow interviewed the Expertise Location team, studied progress on their pilot projects, and reviewed two draft USACE staff reports, then authored a recommended strategy, roadmap, and immediate next steps delivered to USACE’s Knowledge Management Leadership Team.
• Content and Records Management Assessment. Iknow evaluated content strategy, lifecycle management, technology platforms, taxonomies, and roles through stakeholder interviews, documentation and policy review, and technology demonstrations — producing specific action items for the next 18 to 24 months and recommending ProjectWise, an engineering project collaboration suite, for use across USACE.
• Knowledge Management Training. Iknow created a training strategy document covering requirements for both the roughly 37,000-person end-user workforce and the roughly 50-to-100-person KMR cadre, then built “KM Familiarization” programs for both groups in PowerPoint and online formats, using the LearnDash LMS plug-in on WordPress at the CKO’s request.
• Lines of Activity Library. Iknow authored a Microsoft Word–based library of Lines of Activity — the lower-level building blocks of strategy implementation — giving each divisional KMR concrete instructions and guidance for running their local KM programs.

Stakeholders & Collaboration

Iknow worked directly with USACE’s CKO’s office, all 12 divisional KMRs, the Knowledge Management Leadership Team, and the Expertise Location LOE team, in addition to participating in KM Working Group meetings, technology reviews, and ad hoc support throughout the engagement.

Producing 12 Rigorous, Defensible Submissions on a Fixed Deadline

Coordinating evidence-based Maturity Model submissions from 12 independently operating divisions, all working against an external scoring framework and a fixed enterprise deadline, risked inconsistent quality and missed gaps. Iknow addressed this by embedding as subject matter expert across all 12 KMRs simultaneously, delivering division-specific preliminary ratings and gap-closing recommendations rather than generic guidance, and coordinating directly with APQC’s own experts to keep every submission aligned with actual scoring criteria.

Managing an Unusually Broad, Multi-Topic Scope

Six distinct workstreams — spanning maturity assessment, LOE review, records management, training curriculum development, and LOA authoring — created real risk of fragmented delivery and communication breakdowns across a large distributed federal team. Iknow addressed this by adopting Slack as the primary team communication channel in place of email, giving the joint team a searchable historical record and private channels for subgroup work; using Asana as a single master repository for all deliverables and reports; and holding weekly check-in calls to track progress and agree on next steps.

Operational Outcomes

• Supported all 12 divisional KMRs through the Maturity Model submission process, delivering preliminary rating assessments and specific gap-closing recommendations for each division.
• Delivered a complete KM training strategy and built both PowerPoint and LearnDash-based online “KM Familiarization” programs for the roughly 37,000-person workforce and the KMR cadre.
• Produced a content and records management assessment with a defined 18–24 month action plan, including the ProjectWise platform recommendation, and authored a full Word-based Lines of Activity library for divisional KM execution.

Strategic and Organizational Outcomes

USACE’s CKO’s office used Iknow’s recommendations and deliverables to plan the next phase of its KM program implementation, including FY19 budget requests and staff mobilization. The engagement’s immediate next step — formally submitting the Maturity Model package to APQC for evaluation and rating — was positioned to proceed on schedule, keeping USACE’s enterprise Level 3 goal on track.

Timeline to Impact

Iknow delivered across all six support areas within the engagement period. The CKO’s office began applying Iknow’s recommendations immediately, carrying them directly into the FY19 budget planning cycle and the formal APQC submission process that followed.

Core Skills

• Knowledge Management Strategy & Maturity Assessment Support
• Content & Records Management Advisory
• KM Training Strategy & Curriculum Development
• Federal / Public-Sector Knowledge Management Advisory
• Knowledge Management Program Support

Methods & Frameworks

• APQC Knowledge Management Capability Maturity Model (subject matter expertise)
• Stakeholder interviews and documentation review
• Gap analysis and prioritized roadmapping
• Lines of Activity (LOA) development methodology

Technologies & Tools

• ProjectWise engineering project collaboration suite
• LearnDash LMS (WordPress-based online training)
• Slack and Asana for distributed team collaboration