Taking KM Centers of Excellence into the real world at KMWorld 2025

Content governance isn't about control, it's about creating a knowledge community and unlocking value.

At KMWorld 2025, Danielle Henderson, chief knowledge officer, IGM Financial, in her session, “KM Centers of Excellence,” discussed how IGM embarked on an enterprise-wide governance journey, leveraging structured centers of excellence (CoE) frameworks to enhance content integrity, optimize KM, and evolve the content ecosystem to support evolving digital platforms.

Henderson explained how IGM systematically refined its governance strategy, streamlining content, implementing improved lifecycle management best practices, and enhancing search accessibility while reducing risk.

“To be innovative and challenge patterns that keep us stuck, being creative helps us find solutions when we’re stuck,” she said.

Great ideas emerge when people combine their experiences, knowledge, curiosity, and perspectives to solve a challenge, she noted.

“When we try to figure out new ways of working, sometimes it feels messy and is uncomfortable, but we need to work through that to find new ways of managing knowledge,” Henderson said.

The planning phase for IGM included:

• Current state discovery
• Map, define, identify
• Governance optionality
• Governance model design
• Action plan

She outlined the KM challenges, which were the common pain points and complicating factors of managing the content. It can be varied and inconsistent. There was a lack of alignment toward common outcomes. Tools and repository ownership were fragmented across functional groups.

When it comes to governance frameworks there are several options, this includes centralized, CoE-enabled, or decentralized, she explained.

CoE establishes minimum standards and practices oversight; it also can manage core toolsets in collaboration with IT.

IGM’s CoE’S features consisted of:

• Defining knowledge and content strategy in collaboration with business units
• Define and deliver knowledge/content tools and product roadmap in collaboration with BU and technology
• Determine minimum standards and guidelines across content lifecycle
• Enable cross functional collaboration
• Drive continuous improvement based on data and insights

“There are so many opportunities that this can give to people and it’s an ongoing conversation,” Henderson said.

KMWorld returned to the J.W. Marriott in Washington D.C. on November 17-20, with pre-conference workshops held on November 17.

KMWorld 2025 is a part of a unique program of five co-located conferences, which also includes Enterprise Search & Discovery, Enterprise AI World, Taxonomy Boot Camp, and Text Analytics Forum.