Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between AI and firmwide knowledge—not just how AEC firms use knowledge to power AI, but how AI is pushing them to care for their knowledge more intentionally.
When employees use AI-powered tools like Synthesis AI Search to ask questions, they’re finding useful answers from knowledge distributed across content silos and content types, including video. But these benefits are also revealing something else: the quality of those answers depends entirely on the quality of the content behind them.
Outdated content leads to outdated answers. Gaps in documentation mean missed opportunities. Conflicting versions create confusion.
As a response, AEC firms are becoming much more attuned to the importance of maintaining high-quality, up-to-date knowledge across the business. They’re not just investing in AI. They’re investing in the knowledge powering the AI—acquiring it, updating it, and retiring it when it no longer serves the firm.
This raises an old but important question:
How do you keep a large intranet from decaying over time?
Instead of treating a new intranet launch as a one-time project, it may be more helpful to think of it like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. Crews begin at one end, make their way across, and by the time they reach the other side, it’s time to start again. The goal isn’t to finish, but to stay in motion—a continuous cycle of proactive care. And the earlier you can establish that rhythm, the healthier your knowledge base will remain.
That’s why I want to revisit a story from the KA community that feels even more relevant today than when it was first shared at KA Connect back in 2019. It’s the story of how AKF Group, at the time a 500-person multidisciplinary engineering firm with nine offices in the U.S. and two in Mexico, built a simple but powerful process for keeping their knowledge fresh—and how that process became the foundation for what we now call Essential Content Reviews.
You can read more about the Essential Content Review Framework on our website, under Intranet Best Practices. But what I want to share here is the origin story—how one firm, led by a thoughtful and practical knowledge manager named Shannon Kaplan, created a rhythm of content care that’s still shaping how our community maintains knowledge today.
Designing a Strategy to Help AKF’s Knowledge Base Evolve with the Firm
This story begins in 2017, before AKF launched their new Synthesis intranet.
AKF had outgrown the limitations of their legacy intranet. Like many AEC firms, they had accumulated a wide and varied body of internal knowledge—standards, procedures, forms, checklists, documentation—and no clear system for how to keep it current. Content rarely got deleted. Updates happened inconsistently. It wasn’t unusual to find multiple versions of the same document, authored by different people, with no easy way to tell which one was current. Said another way, it became hard to trust what you found.
So when they launched their new Synthesis intranet—named Willis—they came at it with a fresh mindset and a different set of habits. They didn’t just want better content. They wanted a better culture of content stewardship.
Shannon Kaplan, AKF’s Knowledge Manager at the time, helped lead that shift. From the start, she and her team embedded two core strategies into their approach:
Distribute ownership of content across six core communities (People, Technical, Marketing and BD, Learning, Project Management, and IT), so that those closest to the work could keep it current.
Establish a rhythm of proactive content reviews, beginning on day one, to make upkeep a habit—not a scramble.
Shannon proposed a cadence for content maintenance that was simple and sustainable: she would facilitate one proactive content review per month for each of Willis’ six communities. That meant each of the six communities on Willis would get reviewed twice a year. She wanted to get started right away and called the first meeting one month after launch.
Shannon understood that most intranets don’t fall behind because people don’t care. They fall behind because momentum fades. The big launch gets all the energy—and like the tip of an iceberg, it’s the part above the waterline that everyone sees. And rightly so. Launching a new intranet takes vision and commitment. It means setting a clear strategy, aligning stakeholders, building an information architecture, creating a brand, and establishing a compelling value proposition. That is very real work—and it matters.
But it’s only part of the journey. The majority of the iceberg—the mass beneath the surface—is what comes next: the steady, ongoing work of maintenance and evolution. That’s where content needs to be reviewed, updated, and retired. That’s where platform governance takes shape. That’s where habits form. And that’s where trust is either sustained or quietly eroded. This invisible but essential work is what keeps the intranet aligned with the business—and what turns a successful launch into a living, useful system.
This isn’t to say that content should only be updated twice a year. Of course, firms need to respond in real time when a new standard is adopted, a policy shifts, or a new office opens. That kind of responsive content work is essential. But what Shannon understood—and what many firms now recognize—is that reactive updates alone aren’t enough. Proactive reviews are just as important as responsive updates. Together they create a reliable rhythm that ensures every part of the intranet gets touched on a regular basis.
That early commitment—to make maintenance a built-in behavior, not a one-time clean-up effort—would go on to shape what we now call Essential Content Reviews.
How Essential Content Reviews Work
Shannon’s content review process wasn’t complicated. In fact, its simplicity is part of what made it work.
Each month, she’d meet with the community manager for one of the six core intranet communities. That created a cadence of two check-ins per year, per group—a pace that felt both manageable and meaningful. The meetings were short, informal, and deliberately low-pressure. They weren’t designed to catch people off guard or to hold them accountable in a punitive way. They were designed to help.
“Just come,” Shannon would tell them. “You don’t need to prepare anything.”
That simple invitation removed a major barrier. No one could say, “I didn’t have time to look at things yet.” They didn’t need to because Shannon designed Essential Content Reviews to be working meetings.
Each session followed a familiar rhythm. Shannon would start by reviewing intranet analytics and search history with the content owner—live, on the spot. Where are people going? What are they using? What’s dropped off in traffic? Then they’d navigate into the intranet itself and begin looking at pages one by one, asking questions like: Is this still true? Is this still needed? Is this the version we want someone to use next week?
Shannon would take notes along the way, flag outdated or broken content, and assign follow-ups where appropriate.
Shannon also knew that not everything would get done after the meeting—and that was okay. Many of her content owners were billable technical staff, with project demands that understandably came first. So she followed up gently. If something felt important, she’d offer to help, or ask if someone else on the team might be better positioned to take it on. The goal wasn’t to enforce perfection. It was to create a consistent, recurring moment where content owners felt seen, supported, and reminded that their work mattered.
“I wanted them to want to come to the meeting,” she said. “I didn’t want to force it. I wanted it to feel useful.”
That combination—a low ask, a working session, and consistent but gentle follow-up—worked. In the two years following their Synthesis launch, AKF Group never missed a review meeting. Some were rescheduled. None were canceled.
That consistency speaks volumes.
The magic of Shannon’s approach is how it turns maintenance into something relational. Each review is a kind of ritual: a check-in with the people closest to the knowledge, supported by data, grounded in real-world use, and driven by a spirit of stewardship—not control.
What began as one firm’s idea for keeping firmwide knowledge fresh and relevant, evolved into a lightweight framework that continues to serve the KA community today. It’s simple. It’s scalable. And it works.
At its core, the Essential Content Review process looks like this:
Cadence: One review per month, twice a year per community
Inputs: Page analytics, search logs, organizational updates, content owner knowledge
Outputs: Updated content, removed content, improved navigation, new content ideas
Participants: Knowledge manager + community content owner(s)
Outcomes: Fresh, trusted knowledge; stronger relationships; embedded culture of care
In many ways, it’s not just a content review. It’s a ritual of attention. A way to continually ask: What’s still true? What’s changed? What’s missing?
It’s one of the most grounded, humane examples I know of operationalizing continuous improvement in a knowledge system. And it’s very Smarter by Design.
Case Study: Uncovering Hidden Knowledge in the Technical Community
Of all AKF’s content communities, the Technical section was one of the most complex—and most consequential. It housed engineering tools, discipline-specific standards, and firmwide technical guidance. If they could keep this community current and relevant, Shannon felt, the rest would follow.
So in October 2017, just three months after launch, she met with the Technical community’s content owners for their first Essential Content Review.
At first, it wasn’t obvious what to focus on. “We just launched,” someone said. “Nothing’s out of date yet.” That was true. But Shannon came prepared with analytics—and that’s where the conversation started to shift.
Usage was lower than expected. Pages were being visited, but not as often—or by as many people—as the team had hoped. They didn’t think everyone in the firm needed to see their content. But they wanted engineers in other offices to see it. They wanted all engineering disciplines to know these resources existed.
Together, they began to ask different questions: Who do we expect to use this section? Who’s not coming? What might be missing?
That conversation opened the door to a bigger insight. Because AKF was a multidisciplinary, multi-office firm, the content owners realized they couldn’t represent all the relevant knowledge on their own. They needed help surfacing hidden tools, untapped expertise, and office-specific resources that hadn’t yet made their way into the system.
So they tapped Jake Lawrence, AKF’s Technical Director, to rally the team.
Jake created posts with humorous, eye-catching appeal on the intranet—urging engineers across the firm to contribute content, share what they’d created, and help grow the knowledge base. The posts struck a chord. Contributions started coming in.
One of the most important discoveries came soon after.
Through one of those contributions, Jake learned that AKF’s Boston office had created a robust internal guide for navigating codes and standards, but it wasn’t on their intranet, Willis. It was widely known and heavily used in Boston. But almost no one else in the firm had ever seen it.
Recognizing its value, Jake reached out to Caitlin Angelli, one of the architects of the Boston guide, and invited her to take the lead in building out the Codes and Standards section of the Technical community on Willis for the entire firm. Caitlin accepted and got to work.
Within weeks, this section was transformed. New content rolled out regularly. People started finding what they were looking for.
But that was just the beginning.
Uncovering the Boston office’s codes and standards guide sparked a broader realization: many tools, references, and insights across the firm were still siloed by office or discipline. The Essential Content Review process helped surface that blind spot.
It also sparked a change in mindset. People didn’t just start using the Technical community more, they started thinking differently about it. Willis, AKF’s intranet, was becoming the expected home for firmwide knowledge. And contributing content wasn’t just possible, it was encouraged.
That shift fulfilled the deeper intent of AKF’s knowledge strategy. Shannon didn’t just launch a new intranet. She helped design a system where content stewardship was distributed, visible, and supported. Content owners from each of the firm’s six communities took the lead for their respective areas, but they didn’t do it alone. They tapped others—technical directors, subject matter experts, local champions—to help keep the content fresh, accurate, and useful.
Instead of relying on a team of two to maintain a static knowledge base, as they had on their legacy intranet, AKF moved toward a culture of shared responsibility, where knowledge management became everyone’s job.
Sustaining the Habit: Onboarding New Content Owners with Purpose
By the time Shannon shared this story at KA Connect 2019, AKF’s Essential Content Review process had been running smoothly for more than two years. Each community cycled through a structured review twice a year. But maintaining that rhythm required more than a calendar—it required thoughtful onboarding as roles shifted and new content owners stepped in.
Rather than simply updating a calendar invite and adding a name to the next review meeting, Shannon treated onboarding as an opportunity to instill purpose. She took the time to explain how the process had come to be—why it mattered, what it was designed to prevent, and how it helped the firm maintain a living, trustworthy knowledge base.
That context helped new content owners see their role not just as caretakers of content, but as stewards of shared knowledge. Equipped with that perspective, they were more likely to bring thoughtful questions, suggest improvements, and connect the dots between their work and the needs of the broader firm.
In that way, the Essential Content Review program became more than a checklist. It became a habit rooted in shared responsibility. And as people cycled in and out of content ownership roles, the process held together—not just because it was documented, but because its values were carried forward, person to person.
From One Firm to Many: A Shared Best Practice Emerges
When Shannon first shared this story at KA Connect, it was clear she had created something special—not just for AKF, but for anyone grappling with how to keep their knowledge base healthy over time. The process was simple, repeatable, and deeply human. And we knew right away it was worth sharing.
So we did. We invited a small working group of clients to test and refine the approach. We gave it a name: Essential Content Reviews. And over time, it became the foundation of what we now call the Essential Content Review Framework—a core KM practice we’ve recommended to every intranet team we work with.
In 2024, AKF Group was acquired by WSP, and they’re sadly no longer part of the Synthesis community. But Shannon’s work lives on—not just in our best practices, but in the rhythms and rituals of dozens of other firms who’ve made this framework their own. That’s the power of community knowledge: it doesn’t disappear when people or firms move on. It gets passed down, reshaped, and kept alive.
And it continues to evolve.
Today, many firms are incorporating feedback from Synthesis AI Search into their Essential Content Reviews. After running a search, employees can rate the result from one to five stars and leave written comments. That feedback is often specific and actionable—flagging outdated guidance, pointing out missing resources, or identifying when the wrong contact is listed. In some cases, it even surfaces entirely new topics the firm hasn’t documented yet.
This real-time commentary from the people who rely on the intranet every day has become a powerful tool for keeping knowledge accurate, current, and aligned with the firm’s evolving needs. And when paired with a thoughtful program like Essential Content Reviews, it becomes something even more powerful—a virtuous cycle.
Closing Thoughts
Shannon’s work on AKF’s Essential Content Review process illustrates something I’ve seen again and again: the best knowledge managers find success through others.
She didn’t build and sustain momentum by going it alone. She built it by helping others succeed—by making it easier for them to contribute, by showing them why it mattered, and by creating a rhythm that brought people together around shared knowledge.
Success through others is one of the most critical skills in knowledge management. KM leaders rarely have direct authority over the people who own essential content or whose behaviors they’re hoping to influence. So they partner. They coach. They look for win-win opportunities. They build trust. And over time, they embed good habits into the fabric of the firm and knowledge stewardship becomes not just the responsibility of a few, but a shared way of working for everyone.
The other thing great knowledge managers do is design simple programs that have a disproportionate impact.
That’s what I love about this program. It reflects a clear-eyed understanding of human nature and the realities of how an AEC firm operates—how attention ebbs, how deadlines get missed, how good intentions fade over time—and it offers a realistic, durable design in response.
Shannon didn’t just create a content review process. She created a living ritual that honors the knowledge her firm works so hard to produce. That’s why it’s lasted. That’s why it’s spread. That’s why it continues to shape the way firms across our community think about knowledge stewardship today.
Go Deeper
📽️ Watch A Sustainable Approach to Technical Content Maintenance — Shannon Kaplan’s KA Connect 2019 interview on Essential Content Maintenance
📖 Read Planning for Essential Content Maintenance on our website