People

Dr. Simon P. Trussler

Engagement Director

Dr. Simon Trussler is an Engagement Director and a Knowledge Management Specialist at Iknow LLC. He has over 30 years of consulting and project management experience and has been involved with or led over 100 consulting assignments during his career. He also has extensive operational leadership experience in knowledge management.

Career Highlights
  • Prior to working with Iknow LLC, Dr. Trussler spent 24 years as a consultant and a partner at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in the UK, Sweden, and US. For over 12 years, he was responsible for the firm’s global knowledge management and research function. In this role, he designed processes and led a global network of KM staff collecting shareable know-how from project teams, to support BCG’s rapid geographical and product expansion. He also developed a state-of-the-art KM technical platform, providing access to project experience, individual expertise, and shareable documents through a single portal, with a firm-wide taxonomy, search, and guided navigation. He managed four major upgrades and rollouts of this platform including related training and marketing applications.
  • Before taking on the knowledge leadership role, Dr. Trussler was a Partner in BCG’s strategy consulting practice, completing over 80 assignments throughout Western Europe across a wide range of industries and functional areas. Together with two other partners, he started up the Nordic region business for BCG and subsequently spent five years in Stockholm in a variety of leadership and business development roles.
  • After leaving BCG and prior to Iknow, Dr. Trussler spent 5 years as Senior Vice President at Health Dialog, a health care management firm, leading several international business development initiatives and creating and running the firm’s training and knowledge management functions.
  • Dr. Trussler has also advised several start-up companies in the health care sector, working with Assabet Ventures, a healthcare consulting firm, and Senscio Systems, a healthcare technology and services firm.
Education

Dr. Trussler received a doctor of philosophy degree and master of arts degree from Cambridge University, with a focus on urban and regional science and econometrics, 1982.

Selected Clients

Mr. Trussler’s clients include the International Monetary Fund, Merck, UNICEF, UNDP, The World Bank Group, and Roche. Dr. Trussler has also consulted on projects with several global professional services firms.

Personal

Simon is a qualified private pilot and enjoys flying and sailing, as well as a variety of cultural interests, especially classical music, opera, and fine arts.

He has reading-level skills in French, Spanish, and Swedish and a basic knowledge of German.

Location
Boston, Massachusetts
Select Expertise
Strategy Services
Content Services
People Services
Process Services
Technology Services
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Ms. Kim M. Luke

Senior Consultant

Ms. Kim M. Luke is the Chief Financial Officer and a Senior Consultant at Iknow. She has more than 30 years of experience in working with both large publicly-held companies as well as small-to-medium, privately-held, and family-owned businesses.

Career Highlights

Prior to joining Iknow, Ms. Luke was Vice President of Finance at NeoStrata Company, Inc., in Princeton, NJ, where she was responsible for finance, accounting, human resources, and information technology to support the company in their development and distribution of patented therapeutic dermatological products worldwide.

Before that, Ms. Luke effectively managed teams and directed the activities of various departments in both private and public companies. In each role, she has focused on identifying clear objectives, developing sound procedures, process improvement, and internal controls - all toward the goal of meeting organizational objectives.

Education

Ms. Luke earned both a Bachelor of Science degree in Accounting and a Master of Business Administration degree at Rider University, Lawrenceville, New Jersey.

Ms. Luke holds an active CPA license in New Jersey.

Selected Clients

Ms. Luke’s clients include Albemarle Corporation, AT&T, NeoStrata Company, Inc., Prudential Insurance Company of America, Rockwood Specialties, and Strides Pharmaceuticals.

Professional Association & Memberships

Ms. Luke is a member of the:

  • American Institute of Public Accountants (AICPA)
  • Financial Executive Networking Group (FENG)
  • National Association of Tax Professionals (NATP)
  • New Jersey Society of Public Accountants (NJSCPA)
Personal

Kim enjoys reading, cooking, and spending time with family and friends.

Location
Princeton, New Jersey
Select Expertise
Content Services
People Services
Process Services

Ms. Isabella D. Palowitch

Creative Director/Lead Graphic Designer

Ms. Isabella D. Palowitch is the Creative Director/Lead Graphic Designer and a User Experience Specialist at Iknow. She has extensive experience in corporate identity, branding, website design, educational materials, medical communications, book design and production, and marketing publications and promotions. Ms. Palowitch has more than 25 years of experience in the graphic design industry.

Career Highlights

Over the past two decades, Ms. Palowitch’s graphic design experience includes:

  • Award-winning color print materials for the 250th Anniversary Celebrations of Princeton University (numerous CASE Gold Awards).
  • Lead designer for the first Princeton University website (1996–1998).
  • Lead designer for Princeton Symphony Orchestra since 1998. The professional graphic look contributed to the Symphony receiving several New Jersey State Council on the Arts Citation of Excellence Awards (2009–2012).
  • Cotsen Children’s Library (part of Princeton University’s Firestone Library) virtual exhibits attracting a Scout Report on February 13, 2009 for “easiest-to-use” website.
  • Creating image pieces for private schools in the Princeton area (Chapin School, Princeton Academy of the Sacred Heart, Stuart Country Day School), including fundraising brochures with remarkable results.
  • Produced art books and catalogues that sell in major museums, such as The National Gallery of Art Washington, DC, Museum of Modern Art, European museum stores, and online at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.
  • Designer of Iknow’s award-winning graphic identity.
  • Other awards received for design and printing excellence are from organizations such as Graphic Design:USA, Neographics, Benjamin Franklin Premier Print, Astra, and Art Direction Magazine.
  • Designed lasting logos and graphic identities for organizations such as Princeton Academy of the Sacred Heart, Princeton Alumni Council, Princeton Pediatric Group, and others.
Education

Ms. Palowitch earned a master of fine arts degree from the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University and a bachelor degree in art and art education at the Institutul Nicolae Grigorescu, Bucharest.

Selected Clients

Ms. Palowitch’s clients include the Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities (Rutgers University), Infinity Flight Group, the Historical Society of Princeton, Princeton Pediatric Group, Princeton Symphony Orchestra, Princeton University, Superior Court of New Jersey, and the Zimmerli Art Museum (Rutgers University).

Personal

Isabella is an accomplished fine artist and has exhibited her paintings and drawings in New York, Philadelphia, Paris, Madrid, Vienna and Bucharest, as well as in several art publications.

Isabella is fluent in six languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Romanian, and Hungarian).

Location
Princeton, New Jersey
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Mr. Rengarajan Ragavan

Senior Solution Architect

Mr. Rengarajan (Vijay) Ragavan is a Senior Solution Architect at Iknow. Mr. Ragavan designs and delivers sophisticated knowledge management solutions for Iknow’s clients. He has over 17 years of consulting, project management, and solution architecture experience.

Career Highlights

Examples of recent client projects include:

  • Mr. Ragavan architected and implemented a sophisticated, cloud-based, predictive analytics solution for a top-tier financial news aggregator. The solution monitors millions of news content received every day from around the world, proactively identifies problems with the deliveries, and sends alerts to the appropriate user groups. The application also presents high level statistics about the problems to decision makers using interactive dashboards. This solution was built by integrating a very large database that accumulates millions of records per day in a legacy infrastructure, with a cloud infrastructure for anywhere access to the solution.
  • Mr. Ragavan architected and implemented a comprehensive supply chain intelligence solution for a major defense manufacturer. The application collected and analyzed data from multiple government and third-party sources using a variety of structured and unstructured data processing methods and enabled proactive decision making while finding and vetting suppliers for their upcoming contracts. The system used sophisticated text analysis software to analyze and extract information about potential suppliers from unstructured data and provided this information in an interactive dashboard that made review and comparison of these suppliers much more intuitive.
  • Mr. Ragavan designed and implemented an unstructured text processing solution for a top-tier financial news aggregator. The solution analyzes millions of news content received from sources all over the world every day by the firm, parses each piece of content, and categorizes and tags it with rich metadata extracted from the text along with predefined entities from a controlled list. He successfully migrated various pieces of custom applications developed over the years by various groups into a single processing pipeline with a centralized COTS text analytics tool and implemented a web services model.
  • For a leading telecommunications firm, Mr. Ragavan designed and delivered a knowledge management (KM) application for its customer call centers. The solution suite consisted of a combination of enterprise content management, collaboration, records management, and portal and search functionality using best knowledge management practices that were aligned with the requirements of its diverse users. Mr. Ragavan identified and migrated huge repositories of legacy content and related digital assets that were to be managed using the new KM solution. For the client, the resulting solution greatly enhanced and increased the number of first-call resolutions, overall customer satisfaction, customer retention and created new opportunities to up-sell/cross-sell.
  • For a risk management firm, Mr. Ragavan used text analysis tools to extract risk management information from a wide variety of unstructured data sources and applied commercial crowdsourcing for vetting and fact checking the extracted information. The solution used a complex rule-based intelligence extraction engine that parses over 600 different sources including websites, court documents, and SEC filings to collect, organize, analyze, and deliver the risk information.
  • Mr. Ragavan helped a large pharmaceutical company organize its huge repository of historical research papers and related documents by generating multiple taxonomies and then automatically categorizing the documents in the repository using text analysis and “learn-by-example” (LBE) techniques. As a result, the information in the repository dating back to 1992 that was not available for consumption earlier became easily discoverable, providing users with vital information that was classified and placed into logical, business-driven taxonomies. This work also helped enhance the company's enterprise search rollout by enriching the search indices with key phrases and concept words extracted from the documents using the text analysis tools.
Education

Mr. Ragavan received a master of computer applications degree and a bachelor of science degree in physics from Madurai Kamaraj University, India.

Selected Clients

Mr. Ragavan’s clients include Accenture, Amgen, Boehringer Ingelheim, Dow Jones, Forrester Research, IBM, InfoBank Ltd. (UK), Johnson & Johnson, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Mott’s, Pfizer, Raytheon, the Royal Bank of Scotland, TrustMarque International Ltd., the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the U.S. National Parks Service, Vignette, and Verizon.

Location
Princeton, New Jersey
Select Expertise
Technology Services
Business Intelligence
Business Process Management
Collaboration
Document Management
Enterprise Content Management
Enterprise Search
Portals and Websites
Taxonomy
Text Analysis
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Mr. Ralph W. Poole, III

Engagement Director

Mr. Ralph Poole is an Engagement Director at Iknow LLC and a Senior Lecturer in Information and Knowledge Strategy program at Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies. As a knowledge management consulting, he led the creation of Knowledge Management programs at business strategy and IT consultancies, AmLaw 100 Law Firms, largest Pharmaceutical companies, and created the metadata process platform for Dow Jones.

Career Highlights
  • Prior to joining Iknow, Mr. Poole was a Partner at Bridge Consulting International (UK consultancy). In this role, he was responsible for selling and delivering strategy implementation, business transformation, learning, and knowledge management solutions to global clients.
  • At Cap Gemini, a global consulting firm with 90,000 employees, he was the Chief Knowledge Officer; Chair of the Global Knowledge & Learning Council; and Director—Knowledge, Learning, Methods (KLM). He created the Firm's enterprise portal, content, and knowledge processes; governance practices; collaboration technologies; technology infrastructure (including intranet and extranet applications); and content management practices.
  • At Ernst & Young LLP, he was a Principal and the Director of the Global Center for Business Knowledge. In this role, he created the Center for Business Knowledge (CBK), a global organization that managed business research libraries, fact-based business research analysis, practice experience and knowledge, organizational learning, and knowledgebase development.
  • Mr. Poole was the Director of Consulting Services at Bain & Company. He created and managed the firm's knowledge management and business research infrastructure, including the global research libraries and knowledge centers. Mr. Poole developed and implemented state-of-the-art training capabilities and centers.
  • At the Boston Consulting Group, he created a business research library to support fact based competitive analysis.
Education
  • Master of Science degree in Library and Information Science (concentration on classification, taxonomy and metadata in electronic databases), Simons College 1976
  • Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature and Philosophy, magna cum laude, Ithaca College 1974.
Selected Clients

Mr. Poole’s clients include Aiken Gump, Allen & Overy, Amgen, BBC, Battelle Labs, Booz Allen Hamilton, Channel 4, Cooley, Dow Jones, Ernst & Young, Fidelity Investments, Genentech, L.E.K. Consulting, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Pillsbury, Raytheon, Roche, Royal Mail, Serco, Shell, Southern California Edison, State of Delaware, Merck, UK Department of Health, UK National Health Service, UNICEF, Utah Department of Transportation, Washington State Department of Transportation, Winston Strawn, and The World Bank.

Professional Association & Memberships

Mr. Poole is a member of the:

  • AIIM, the enterprise content management industry association
  • The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
  • Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
  • The Special Libraries Association
Personal

Ralph has three grown children. He is a huge baseball fan and roots for the Boston Red Sox.

Location
Boston, Massachusetts
Select Expertise
Strategy Services
Content Services
People Services
Process Services
Technology Services
Business Process Management
Enterprise Content Management
Taxonomy
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100