From Empty Shelves to a World-Class Library: Content Acquisition for Saudi Arabia’s National Energy Laboratory.

About the Client

K.A.CARE serves as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s national energy laboratory for atomic, solar, wind, geothermal, and other emerging renewable energy technologies, operating today within the ambitious energy diversification targets of Saudi Vision 2030. Following its rapid growth since 2010, K.A.CARE had already partnered with Iknow to build the knowledge management foundation, taxonomy, and governance model described in Case Study #160 — but that program’s own content audit revealed that the organization still lacked meaningful access to the external research and data its work depended on.

Industry Context

Research content platforms have moved even further toward automated, AI-integrated delivery since this engagement. Major scientific and business content providers — including EBSCO, ProQuest, and Elsevier — have embedded generative AI directly into their discovery platforms since 2025, and by 2026 licensed-content platforms are being connected directly to AI agents through protocols such as MCP, letting research teams search, license, and act on content without leaving their AI tools. The automated connectors and metadata-normalization workflow Iknow built in 2015 to feed vendor content directly into K.A.CARE’s SharePoint environment reflects the same underlying principle driving that evolution: licensed content only creates value once it flows automatically and consistently into the systems researchers actually use, rather than sitting in a separate subscription silo.

Current Situation

K.A.CARE’s content audit found that very little external data and published information was flowing into the organization, even though staff across its Sectors and Departments needed access to world-class databases, publications, and other content sources to support their research and business objectives. K.A.CARE asked Iknow to identify and procure a comprehensive collection of external content and to make sure that content was fully usable inside the knowledge management system already under development.

• Minimal external content inflow. K.A.CARE’s own content audit found that almost no external data or published information was reaching the organization’s staff.
• Broad, heterogeneous content needs. Staff across many technical, business, and policy domains needed access to world-class databases, publications, and data sources, with no established process for identifying or evaluating them.
• No structured vendor negotiation process. K.A.CARE had no existing mechanism for identifying content vendors and aggregators, comparing their offerings, or negotiating favorable pricing and terms.
• Integration, not just subscription. A one-time bundle of licensed subscriptions would not be enough — the content needed to flow automatically into the new KM system with metadata consistent with K.A.CARE’s existing taxonomy, or it would remain effectively invisible to the staff who needed it.

• Identify and evaluate external content sources relevant to K.A.CARE’s Sectors and Departments based on documented business requirements.
• Negotiate contract terms and pricing with content vendors and aggregators.
• Develop recommendations for senior management on the optimal set of content sources to support the organization.
• Support K.A.CARE’s Procurement Department in purchasing approved content licenses.
• Integrate acquired content into SharePoint with automated downloads, consistent metadata, and search indexing.

How Iknow Structured the Work

Iknow structured the engagement around three sequential activities: assess and recommend, purchase, and integrate — ensuring that by the time any content was licensed, it was already destined for a defined place inside K.A.CARE’s knowledge management system rather than becoming an isolated subscription.

Key Activities & Decisions

• External Content Acquisition Assessment. Iknow identified relevant external content for K.A.CARE’s Sectors and Departments based on their business requirements, contacted content vendors and aggregators to obtain their source lists, negotiated contract arrangements and price quotes, developed K.A.CARE’s overall content acquisition strategy, and delivered recommendations to senior management on the optimal set of content sources.
• Purchase External Content. Following senior management’s approval of the expenditure, Iknow supported K.A.CARE’s Procurement Department directly in purchasing the content licenses from the recommended vendors.
• Integrate External Content into SharePoint. Iknow configured SharePoint to receive content from vendors with ready-made SharePoint 2013 integrations, established automated content downloads, converted incoming administrative metadata to remain consistent with the new KM system’s standards, added topic metadata using Smartlogic, and indexed the content in SharePoint search.

Stakeholders & Collaboration

Iknow worked with K.A.CARE senior management to secure approval and direction, with the Procurement Department to execute purchases, and directly with external content vendors and aggregators to negotiate terms — while continuing to build on the taxonomy and SharePoint foundation established under the earlier Case Study #160 engagement.

Matching a Fragmented Vendor Market to Real Organizational Needs

With content needs spanning news, energy policy, technical data, and investment information across many different Sectors and Departments, a generic content bundle would have satisfied no one well. Iknow addressed this by grounding vendor identification and evaluation directly in documented business requirements gathered from each Sector and Department before any vendor negotiation began.

Making Licensed Content Actually Usable, Not Just Purchased

A collection of new subscriptions would have added little value if staff still had to search each vendor’s platform separately. Iknow addressed this by building automated content downloads directly into SharePoint, normalizing incoming administrative metadata to match the KM system’s existing standards, adding topic metadata through Smartlogic, and indexing everything in SharePoint search — so newly published content became findable within K.A.CARE’s own knowledge management system as a matter of course.

Operational Outcomes

• Delivered a curated external content collection spanning news and general information, energy-related trends and policy papers, energy-related technical data, and investment and business development data.
• Negotiated and finalized vendor contracts and supported Procurement through the full purchase process for recommended content licenses.
• Built automated SharePoint integrations, including content downloads, normalized administrative metadata, Smartlogic-based topic tagging, and search indexing.

Strategic and Organizational Outcomes

The recommended content collection met the needs of many different internal stakeholders across K.A.CARE’s Sectors and Departments while remaining highly cost-effective, directly closing the gap the earlier content audit had identified. By fully integrating the licensed content into the KM system built under the broader Case Study #160 program, Iknow ensured newly published research and data reached K.A.CARE’s staff automatically going forward, rather than requiring ongoing manual effort to locate and retrieve it.

Timeline to Impact

Within roughly four months of the engagement’s start, K.A.CARE had a fully licensed, cost-effective external content collection integrated and searchable inside its knowledge management system.

Core Skills

• Content Strategy & Acquisition
• Vendor Negotiation & Contract Support
• Systems Integration
• Metadata & Taxonomy Alignment

Methods & Frameworks

• Business-requirements-driven content source evaluation
• Vendor identification and negotiation methodology
• Automated content integration and metadata normalization

Technologies & Tools

• Microsoft SharePoint 2013 vendor integrations and search indexing
• Smartlogic (topic metadata tagging)