2025 KM REALITY AWARD WINNER: Las Vegas Valley Water District

The KM Reality Award recognizes an organization in which knowledge management is a positive reality, not just rhetoric. The award recipient has demonstrated leadership in the implementation of knowledge management practices and processes, realizing measurable business benefits.

To be considered for the reality award, the knowledge management program must be in place for at least 1 year, receive support from senior management, and have defined metrics to evaluate the initiative and its impact on organizational goals.

During the KMWorld 2025 conference, on Thursday November 20, 2025, the Las Vegas Valley Water District was announced as the winner of the 2025 KM Reality Award. The runners-up for the award include Mubadala Investment Company and Baker McKenzie.

The Las Vegas Valley Water District (The District) is a not-for-profit agency that has served the community since 1954. Established to provide water to the growing Las Vegas Valley, the District has evolved into a vital utility delivering safe, reliable, and high-quality water—tested and treated in state-of-the-art facilities—to more than1.5 million residents and businesses in one of the world’s most dynamic and rapidly expanding communities.

Challenge

For more than a decade, the District has recognized the need to address its ever-growing collection of files, digital information, drawings, maps, and databases as well as the institutional knowledge of a significant portion of senior staff preparing for retirement. The challenge of organizing, surfacing, and managing this largely unstructured content and deep-rooted knowledge across an organization of the District’s size and complexity in a rapidly changing technical landscape was adaunting one to say the least.

Strategy

The District identified information as a vital organizational resource scattered throughout the company. To effectively manage this resource at scale, the concept of “Information Governance” was introduced as an enterprise initiative. Today that initiative has evolved into a comprehensive knowledge management program led by Signa Gundlach, the District’s IG manager.

This program integrates multi-disciplinary approaches, policies, processes, and controls to maximize the value of organizational knowledge and information while minimizing associated risks and costs. Success required Gundlach, together with the District’s information governance steering committee, to develop a plan to identify, classify, and protect valuable information, so that the knowledge contained within this largely unstructured content could be effectively utilized.

The project included the review, targeted cleanup, and migration of nearly 50 million files from various locations into M365 (SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive). Organizational change management, communications, and end user training supported the placement of content in the following repositories:

Teams as a knowledge sharing space primarily for projects where cross-functional teams can focus on relevant information and collaborate through open or secured channels.

SharePoint as a content repository to serve as the “single source of truth” for department-centric content allowing for intentional permissioning for specific workgroups.

OneDrive also as a content repository assigned to individual users, ideal for drafts and personal content over which single-user, password-protected control is required.

Once the content was appropriately homed, a second project to classify and govern the content in accordance with the District’s records retention policy and schedule was led and implemented by IG staff at Gundlach’s direction and with the support of enabling technology.

In conjunction with this, Gundlach developed and implemented a knowledge management organizational structure to support the program for the long-term. With the support of key stakeholders, she developed two roles that were implemented at the District.

Results

The implementation of the District's Knowledge Management program has yielded a broad array of tangible outcomes, transformative benefits, and lasting impacts across the organization. By modernizing information practices, enhancing digital fluency, and cultivating a culture of collaboration and compliance, the District has positioned itself to maximize the value of its knowledge assets and support its strategic objectives.

The following list summarizes the key achievements that have resulted from this initiative:

• Enabling universal remote access to content
• State of the art collaboration tools
• Visibility into and management of the content lifecycle
• Improved file access controls
• Standardized departmental portals for access to departmental content
• Well-designed information architecture
• Improved search
• Eliminated ROT
• Improved compliance with regulatory and business requirements
• Consolidated silos
• Improved file sharing
• Cultural change to support District’s knowledge management goals
• Improved ability to reorganize and provision access to information as organizational changes dictate