Listening Before Building: An Enterprise Knowledge Needs Assessment for the World Bank Group.

About the Client

The World Bank Group is a multilateral development institution comprising five constituent organizations, working with 189 member countries through staff drawn from more than 170 countries and offices in over 130 locations worldwide. Its mission centers on ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity, delivered through lending, advisory services, and country-level engagement carried out by operations staff embedded in task teams and country programs around the world.

Industry Context

The World Bank has a long, closely studied history with knowledge management: it declared itself a “Knowledge Bank” as far back as 1996, and a major 2014 reorganization consolidated staff into 19 sector-focused Global Practices and Cross-Cutting Solution Areas specifically to improve knowledge flow across the institution. Yet independent evaluations of that reform repeatedly found that structural change alone did not fix WBG’s underlying KM challenges — knowledge management had often been treated as an afterthought, with fragmented ownership and no consistent standards for how knowledge was captured, shared, or applied. That history made grounding the next KM strategy in real, staff-level evidence — rather than another top-down structural fix — particularly important for WBG’s new KM director.

Current Situation

Although WBG had invested in and promoted knowledge management for years, it had deliberately avoided centralized control, leaving its 19 practices and regions to build independent KM programs on shared IT platforms but without common strategy or standards. That autonomy had produced persistent gaps, inconsistencies, and redundancies, a problem accentuated by the 2014 reorganization. WBG hired a new KM director in 2016 to build a more consistent enterprise approach, but she recognized the organization lacked a foundational understanding of what its operations staff actually needed — without which any new KM strategy risked missing the mark entirely.

• Two decades of fragmented KM ownership. 19 practices and regions had each built independent KM programs on shared IT platforms with no common strategy, producing persistent gaps, inconsistencies, and redundancies that undermined the value WBG had hoped to realize.
• No foundational understanding of actual staff needs. Despite years of KM investment, WBG had never comprehensively assessed what its own operations staff needed to do their jobs — risking that any new strategy would optimize for the wrong priorities.
• Enormous diversity of roles and use cases. With 7,000 operations staff spanning roles like task team leader, country manager, and team specialist, and activities ranging from lending to advisory work to country planning, a single generic assessment risked a “one size fits all” analysis that missed meaningful differences between roles.
• A globally dispersed, hard-to-reach population. Operations staff were spread across WBG’s global office network, making a representative, statistically meaningful data-gathering effort logistically demanding.

• Identify the top knowledge management needs of WBG’s operations staff, including the relative importance of different knowledge types.
• Capture concrete examples and vignettes of where and how knowledge was required in day-to-day work.
• Assess current knowledge resources, including their use, staff satisfaction, and suggestions for improvement.
• Analyze findings by key role and key activity, rather than in aggregate, to make results directly actionable for strategy development.

How Iknow Structured the Work

Iknow structured the engagement around three phases — Planning, Data Gathering, and Analysis — explicitly designed to support role- and activity-level analysis rather than a single aggregate view of WBG’s knowledge needs.

Key Activities & Decisions

• Planning Phase. Iknow completed WBG’s own internal online training courses, reviewed a library of WBG operations and KM documents, and interviewed internal staff to build a deep enough understanding of WBG’s products, services, personnel, and roles to design the assessment around real operations personas and activities rather than generic KM categories.
• Data Gathering Phase. Iknow designed the initial survey questionnaire and deployed it via SurveyMonkey, incorporating branching logic so each respondent received questions tailored to their role and experience at a reasonable length. After WBG reviewed and tested the questionnaire with a small internal sample, Iknow refined it based on that feedback. More than 1,000 WBG staff completed the survey — roughly a 15% response rate — giving sufficient coverage across the large number of roles, services, and use cases the KM director needed to see. Iknow then conducted seven role-specific focus groups to validate the survey results, discuss critical findings, and capture additional feedback, recorded in written notes.
• Analysis Phase. Iknow conducted a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of the survey and focus group data, combining quantitative ratings of needs and satisfaction with qualitative examples and improvement suggestions. The team produced a 60-page final report and a companion Excel file synthesizing the qualitative feedback, with recommendations spanning the full range of a KM program — knowledge sharing behaviors, KM leadership roles, knowledge capture and curation processes, communities, and tools.

Stakeholders & Collaboration

Iknow worked directly with WBG’s KM director throughout the engagement, along with internal staff interviewed during planning, more than 1,000 survey respondents, and focus group participants across WBG’s operations roles — producing a report intended for the KM director’s business stakeholders and WBG’s senior leadership team.

Designing One Instrument for Wildly Different Roles and Activities

A survey built for WBG’s entire 7,000-person operations population risked becoming either too generic to be useful or too long for any single respondent to complete. Iknow addressed this through extensive planning-phase immersion — completing WBG’s own training, reviewing its documentation, and interviewing internal staff — to design the assessment around real operations personas and activities from the outset, then built branching logic into the SurveyMonkey questionnaire so each respondent received role-tailored questions at a manageable length.

Achieving Response Depth Sufficient for Role-Level Analysis

A busy, globally dispersed population risked producing a survey response too thin or too skewed toward certain roles to support the role-by-role and activity-by-activity analysis WBG needed. Iknow addressed this by iteratively testing and refining the questionnaire with WBG staff before full deployment, then supplementing the 1,000-plus response survey with seven dedicated focus groups organized by role to validate findings and capture nuance the survey alone could not.

Operational Outcomes

• Gathered more than 1,000 completed survey responses from WBG operations staff, a roughly 15% response rate sufficient to cover the full range of roles, services, and use cases the KM director needed to understand.
• Conducted seven role-specific focus groups to validate and extend the survey findings across WBG’s key operations personas.
• Delivered a 60-page final report with a companion Excel file synthesizing qualitative feedback, covering the full range of KM program elements.

Strategic and Organizational Outcomes

The assessment gave WBG’s KM director deep, previously unavailable insight into the actual knowledge needs of the operations staff at the center of the Bank’s mission. Iknow’s recommendations were deliberately structured to include initiatives WBG could launch immediately, giving the KM director’s team concrete ways to demonstrate visible progress to business stakeholders and WBG’s senior leadership team while longer-term strategy work continued.

Timeline to Impact

Iknow completed the planning, data gathering, and analysis phases within the seven-month engagement. The report’s built-in quick-start recommendations gave WBG’s KM director an immediate, evidence-based foundation for action even as the broader enterprise KM strategy continued to take shape.

Core Skills

• Knowledge Needs Assessment & Strategy Advisory
• Survey & Focus Group Research Design
• Enterprise Knowledge Management Program Design
• Stakeholder Engagement & Executive Advisory

Methods & Frameworks

• Role and persona-based assessment design
• Branching survey methodology
• Mixed-methods (quantitative and qualitative) analysis
• Prioritized, actionable recommendation development

Technologies & Tools

• SurveyMonkey (online survey deployment)
• Excel (qualitative data synthesis)