How to Leverage Everything Your Company Knows When Responding to RFPs.

About the Client

Company AA is a leading government services and technology company.

Industry Context

Government contracting is a document-intensive, high-stakes business: independent industry surveys estimate the average RFP win rate at around 45%, yet more than a third of government contractors report win rates of 25% or lower. Proposal costs alone commonly run 1% to 4% of total contract value. Firms that centralize and reuse proposal content effectively consistently win more often, which is why proposal knowledge management has become a competitive differentiator rather than a back-office concern. That pressure is amplified for companies born of merger and acquisition activity, since each predecessor organization typically brings its own content repositories, taxonomies, and tools.

Current Situation

Company AA’s business development activities were fragmented across its divisions and service lines. Proposal writers lacked access to all repositories containing the company’s proposal assets. No single search tool could index and display those assets together, and inconsistent metadata schemas across repositories made it difficult to find the best existing content. Company AA’s leadership identified knowledge management investment as one of the most effective levers for improving proposal quality, win rates, and revenue growth, and turned to Iknow for help.

• Proposal knowledge trapped in more than 20 disconnected repositories. Company AA had over 20 stand-alone, unclassified content repositories related to business development, which were the most difficult to access and use, resulting in proposals that reflected individual writers’ knowledge rather than the company’s collective expertise.
• Aging, unconfigured infrastructure. Most repositories ran on seven-year-old on-premises SharePoint 2013 deployments that were largely out-of-the-box, with no configuration to leverage available features or Company AA-specific use cases.
• No enterprise-grade knowledge management tooling. Company AA had no installed platforms for enterprise search, metadata management, document management, digital asset management, records management, or text analysis.
• High stakes and a compressed timeline. With an $80 billion pipeline target and contracts awarded to the highest-rated proposals in a stringent, competitive market, Company AA needed an actionable roadmap quickly — not a long-term study.

• Assess Company AA’s current state of knowledge management across the business development content ecosystem through data requests and stakeholder interviews.
• Identify the functional requirements needed to improve content findability for proposal writers.
• Develop and evaluate a full slate of technology options against weighted business, technical, and cost criteria.
• Deliver a phased, actionable implementation roadmap that Company AA’s leadership could fund and execute.

How Iknow Structured the Work

Iknow structured the eight-week engagement into three sequential workstreams: a KM current-state assessment, recommendations development, and an implementation roadmap, working closely with Company AA’s internal KM project team throughout.

Key Activities & Decisions

• Current-state data collection. Iknow submitted three formal data requests and conducted 14 stakeholder interviews, using a detailed interview guide and preparing written summaries to consistently capture findings.
• Current-state findings. Iknow identified more than 20 unclassified repositories, primarily out-of-the-box SharePoint 2013 deployments, no enterprise KM tooling of any kind, and four primary functional requirements: enterprise search, taxonomy and metadata management, content workflow, and document management.
• Options development. Working with Company AA’s internal KM team, Iknow developed 17 candidate KM solution options, screening them first against future-state IT architecture assumptions and then scoring the shortlist against weighted business requirements, technical requirements, and cost criteria.
• Recommended solution. Iknow recommended a platform built on Alfresco Community Edition — which includes complete versions of Apache Solr for enterprise search and Activiti for workflow automation — enhanced with open-source taxonomy and metadata tools, including Protégé, Apache Jena, and Stanford CoreNLP, to deliver faceted search and browse navigation.
• Consolidation recommendation. Iknow recommended consolidating Company AA’s 20-plus SharePoint 2013 repositories into a single new Alfresco repository and retiring the legacy systems.
• Implementation roadmap. Iknow proposed nine sequenced projects: Solution Pilot, Governance, Security Model, Workflow Automation, Taxonomy Update, Solution Implementation, Reward and Recognition, Change Management and Communication, and Measurement.

Stakeholders & Collaboration

Iknow served as prime contractor, working directly with Company AA’s internal KM project team to validate findings and evaluate options. Company AA used Iknow’s analysis and recommendations to prepare an internal funding request, which was submitted to the CEO and his executive leadership team for approval.

Evaluating Options Objectively Inside a Newly Merged Organization

With business development activity fragmented across several legacy companies, any recommendation risked being perceived as favoring one predecessor organization’s tools or habits over another’s. Iknow addressed this by generating a broad field of 17 options and applying a staged, criteria-driven evaluation — first screening against future-state architecture assumptions, then scoring finalists against weighted business, technical, and cost criteria — so the recommendation rested on defensible evidence rather than internal politics.

Delivering Enterprise Capability Without an Enterprise Price Tag

Company AA needed enterprise search, workflow automation, taxonomy management, and document management, but a fully proprietary enterprise content stack risked being costly to license across a large, newly combined organization. Iknow addressed this by centering its recommendation on Alfresco Community Edition, an open-source platform that already bundled proven enterprise search and workflow engines, and by layering in additional open-source semantic tools rather than proprietary add-ons.

Quantitative Outcomes

• Discovery scope: Three formal data requests and 14 structured stakeholder interviews completed within an eight-week engagement.
• Options evaluated: 17 candidate KM technology solutions, screened and scored against weighted criteria.
• Consolidation opportunity identified: 20+ legacy SharePoint repositories recommended for consolidation into a single Alfresco repository.
• Roadmap delivered: Nine sequenced implementation projects spanning pilot through governance, security, and measurement.

Qualitative Outcomes

Company AA’s leadership gained a clear, evidence-based understanding of why its proposal content was hard to find and a concrete, fundable plan to fix it — directly addressing the COO’s concern that proposals reflected individual knowledge rather than the company’s collective expertise. Company AA used Iknow’s analysis and recommendations to build an internal funding request that went to the CEO and executive leadership team, moving the initiative from assessment to a real budget decision.

Timeline to Impact

Iknow delivered the full three-workstream engagement — current-state assessment, recommendations, and implementation roadmap — within the contracted eight-week period, with Company AA’s KM funding request reaching CEO-level review in that same window.

Core Skills

• KM current-state assessment
• Technology selection & evaluation
• Enterprise content strategy
• Implementation roadmapping

Methods & Frameworks

• Structured stakeholder interviews and data requests
• Weighted, multi-criteria technology evaluation
• Phased implementation roadmap design

Technologies & Tools

• Alfresco Community Edition, Apache Solr, and Activiti
• Protégé, Apache Jena, and Stanford CoreNLP