In Conversation | Joe Hilger and Sarah Downs

Sarah Downs, our Director of Client Solutions, talked with Joe Hilger, COO and co-founder of Enterprise Knowledge. Joe has over thirty years’ experience designing and implementing cutting-edge, enterprise-scale knowledge and information management solutions. Joe consults with organizations across the world and is a frequent speaker and instructor on topics including enterprise search, enterprise content management, knowledge graphs, machine learning, and explainable AI. For this conversation Joe shared his thoughts on the semantic layer, what’s next for AI, and the power of intellectual curiosity.

SD: Tell us about your career evolution. What brought you to your role at Enterprise Knowledge?

JH: I started in consulting after college back in 1990. I worked for a variety of organizations like Coopers & Lybrand, which is now PwC. It was there I stumbled into enterprise content management in the early 2000s, which led me to enterprise search. During this period, I met my future business partner, Zach Wahl. For a while, we worked and competed with each other. One day, we both thought we should start something. From that conversation Enterprise Knowledge (EK) was founded in June 2013. It has been a fun run ever since.

SD: What was that like taking that leap –  leaving a very traditional corporate career to found your own company?

JH: It’s a neat story. I was running a branch office of a consultancy. We were small office but consistently profitable. We were doing quite well, and I had learned a ton from the company founders. I reached a point, though, where I needed to take the next leap in my career. And as I was beginning to explore this I thought: who is someone I have worked with who I could confide in and talk through what my next step should be? Zach Wahl knows a lot of people – I’ll call him. We started talking and both said: let’s give this a go.

At the start, we thought: “We’re so connected, this will be easy!” But we found out a lot about who our friends were, who stayed connected. For Zach, Dave Clarke was a big one. And he’s always remembered that.

It took us six months to secure our first client. Then came our second and third. Within 10 months of that first client, we were able to hire our first employee. Today, we are nearly 80 people, and every year we keep growing.

SD: What consistent growth for the EK team. This, of course, requires consistent hiring. What do you look for in your team members? What do you evaluate when you’re interviewing new team members?

JH: This is something that has always been important to us: How do we make sure we get the right people? Of course, we want people to know our industry, but there are some key traits that are really important to us. It’s these traits that we look for to ensure we have a high-performing team:

1. Intellectual curiosity I am proud when I watch our company compete with other firms. We recently spoke at a conference where we had three speaking engagements, and the audience came to listen to our team and the response was “wow, these people are so smart.” My response is yes, because they all want to learn every day. That’s the power of intellectual curiosity – the way you find people that make a difference.
2. Kindness. We are in the service industry, and we also want to foster a collaborative environment, so kindness is essential. We are proud that we have really embodied kindness as a company, almost to a fault at times. But at the end of the day, we are a service provider – our fundamental role is to help others. Individuals that are intellectually curious and naturally kind just tend to make the best consultants and are a perfect fit for us and our culture.
3. Finally, the last trait we look for is a little hunger. What I mean by that is someone who’s eager to prove themselves.

I’ve mentioned these in a very specific order intentionally – starting from the most important. And these characteristics need to be in balance. If a team member is too hungry, they won’t be kind, or they might take shortcuts.

During the selection process we do our best to evaluate these traits, above all else. How much does this candidate want to learn? Do they demonstrate kindness, do they want to help? And finally, do they want more? Do they want to grow?

SD: I used to be a consultant myself, and what you have described really matches my experience as well. You’ve described this triad or triangle of traits – and there will be some natural tensions across these characteristics. The need to deliver and strive while also being kind. Needing to be deeply curious about also delivering a specific scope within a time frame. But when you strike the right balance, it ends up making a great consultant, delivering great client service.

I know that client satisfaction is a real priority for EK. How do you measure client satisfaction and what systems do you have for keeping satisfaction high?

JH: For all our client work we hold regular project check-ins. These meetings are super important to us, both to leadership and the project teams, and we make them a priority.

The focus of the check-in is simple but powerful: come to us with your problems, and we’ll jointly solve them together. Often people don’t want to share the bad news. We’ve tried to create an environment at EK that fosters these conversations. We ask each meeting: What are you struggling with? This has created an expectation where people are excited to say “…the meeting’s coming up – I’ve got to tell them what isn’t working,” or “I really want to improve this element of the project, and I’m excited to generate ideas.” As we have discussed, we already have a culture of people who want to serve, and these check-ins give us the time and space to make our project teams successful and our clients happy.

SD: What an amazing way of institutionalizing a growth mindset and continuous improvement. It seems like you’ve been able to cultivate a “no blame culture” where people feel they can be open about what they want to do better or where they are facing challenges. And the whole team is focusing on: “how do we do better for our clients?” – keeping client satisfaction at the center. How does this play out in your customer relationships?

JH: A message we constantly hit home with our teams is: your job is more than just delivering. Your job is to truly understand the challenges our clients face and find solutions for these problems. We recognize that our clients have chosen to invest in EK, and our role is to invest right back in them. This is a part of the corporate culture, our mindset, how we want people to act. We call it the EK Way. It’s framed on our wall. This is one of the most important things we have created as a company, and it’s about how we treat each other and how we treat our clients. It’s one of the reasons our clients fight for us.

One of our favorite stories is one of our customers who moved companies. One of her requirements at her new organization was: “you have to allow me to hire the EK team.” When they brought her on, we were part of her strategic plan.

Our projects typically last from three to six months long, but we’ve had some clients whom we’ve worked with for six years. These long-term engagements are because our clients keep looking for new projects on which they want to collaborate with us.

SD: The client’s success becomes your success – you remain passionate about solving client problems, which allows you to help them address more, greater challenges. A nice, virtuous cycle.

I can also see through this how you arrived at your key hiring characteristics – you can see how that combination of hunger and intellectual curiosity leads to identification of mutual opportunities, but the kindness and empathy makes sure it’s all in service of the client first and foremost.

Can you tell us about the substance of your projects – what client problems are you solving?

JH: Knowledge management strategy is one of the hottest areas for us. We start with the idea that our services make sure that the right people get the right information at the right time.

We’ve had multiple enterprise organizations come to us and say: “we need a strategy for how we manage all of our knowledge, data, and information.” The consulting side of our business works with their teams and their executives to develop a plan, a roadmap, and a set of projects to build and improve the way they capture, manage, and share information.

A lot of projects are looking at classic content challenges: information management, taxonomy management, and componentized content management. There has recently been a resurgence of search work. But regardless of the type of project, at the end of the day it comes back to getting people the right information.

We do a lot of work with Chief Data Officers (CDO). Many of these clients are struggling to manage their data warehouses. Our semantic layer services have been a great way to solve many of the common problems CDOs face today. The best way to describe the semantic layer is to think of it as a map between the way the business thinks about information and the way the information is stored.

We have been talking about it for a while, the analysts are talking about it and now companies are embracing it.

Knowledge graphs and the end-to-end tools that you are creating at Squirro and Synaptica help make this semantic layer a reality in a way that has never previously been possible.

SD: Yes it certainly has been a few years where you can’t get away from these buzzwords: LLMs, Knowledge Graphs, RAG. But we are at an exciting moment, I think, when we are moving past the buzzwords and into operational reality. How do you see your clients using knowledge graphs today and do you think that’s going to change over time?

JH: Everyone is embracing the AI bandwagon but rapidly realize “garbage in, garbage out.” The technology has changed but a core fundamental remains: how do we know that we have the right information?

The initial jump has been: “let’s create chat bots and let’s put the knowledge graph or let’s put the LLM in front of our search, so it gives back the answer that we’re all accustomed to.” That was the initial leap, and we see this in some of our search projects. But I think some of our most interesting work is when we consider the LLM, not as the endpoint, but as a partner in what we do.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. We are working with a very large financial institution, and they were managing risk. They needed a list of terms, basically a taxonomy, which would suggest risks. Since there was nothing to start with, they were going to use another professional services vendor, a Big 4 consultancy, to analyze thousands of contracts and start to build a list of terms. The project was based on a team of people doing this work.

One of our team felt this didn’t make sense, and he quietly, and with curiosity said, “you know, I think I could use an LLM to do this.” We said to our client, “do you mind if we try this”? Our team member went off and, after a week, he said: “I’ve got it working.” We had a demo, and it became a jaw dropping moment. They would have needed as many as 10 consultants to work on this project and the need for outside help nearly went away completely. The client was happy. The LLM did the research and analysis in a way that couldn’t be done before, and then someone could augment it from there.

I love that Squirro + Synaptica are in many ways at the forefront of this and of course they’ve done it through search and chat bots because that’s where everyone is working right now. But we know that there’s more to do here. Inserting a partner into part of this process is where we’re going to see value as companies get smarter.

SD: That’s interesting. We talked with Dorian Selz for another Insights Interview  a few months ago. In that conversation he said something similar – chatbots are where people start with LLMs. It is not where people are going to end.

The chatbot functionality feels so human to people – it’s an incredibly appealing front-end interface but not always reliable without a knowledge graph back-end, and it’s limited in what business problems it can solve. What you’ve described so well is that the LLM functionality needs to partner with a human in the right way. LLMs do some things well – people do other things well. How do you combine them for a much better solution?

With a lot of the AI innovation people worry about their roles but here is a perfect example of how the technology can make us all better at our jobs; it’s not a lack of work, but higher, different work that the technology can enable. That’s exciting.

JH: We have been through this so many times during industrial and technology revolutions. This isn’t new. The Internet was going to eliminate jobs for many people, but what really happened is it changed the work people did.

Another example: we were interviewing people to join the EK team, and it was clear we weren’t asking the right questions. Our team developed a process where candidates submit a resume for a specific position. The LLM compared resume against job requirements and generate the candidate’s strengths for the position, potential weaknesses, and recommended interview questions written in the style that’s defined in EK interview training.

SD: You have given some great examples of how LLMs and humans can partner to great effect.

I know you are often advising clients on enterprise solutions and taxonomy management tools, even in this time of rapid evolution. What do you think makes a good enterprise taxonomy software in the current environment?

JH: Early on there were some differentiators. Auto-tagging was critical and then everyone wanted integration with tools like SharePoint/365. Those were kind of the essentials. Now it feels like most vendor providers have that. Now enterprises are looking for solutions to develop the semantic layer, which I mentioned earlier – that connective map that ties structured and unstructured information together.

It’s something that’s very appealing about the Synaptica acquisition by Squirro. Synaptica had all the enterprise-level capabilities for taxonomy and ontology management. Now, as part of Squirro, you’re not just getting one piece of the puzzle; you’re getting an extensible, larger piece of what’s needed.

At a recent large data conference, the question that came up multiple times was: “what are the products and the system architecture you need to develop a semantic layer?” We listed all the tools you need: data catalogue, search engine, taxonomy and ontology management system.

Most say: “That seems like a lot of technology.” But you really do need all these pieces. Clients face the need to purchase different tools or stitch together existing tools to create the full continuum. That’s not an answer they love because it creates a lot of complexity for the organization to manage. Companies today want to work with a solution that solves most of the problem. They don’t want a one-off tool.

The fact that we are seeing all these requisites in one software tool with Synaptica is really meaningful. At EK, we are excited that we are seeing consolidation of the stack in a way that lets us go to clients and offer them, for the first time, a solution through which they can access most of what they need all in one place. It’s so much better.

SD: I come from a taxonomist background, so something I’m really proud of in our tools is how we offer no-code solutions that put great power in the hands of the taxonomist. Instead of owning one piece of the workflow and then being blocked by a need for data science or engineering resources, our taxonomist users can power 90% of a full auto-categorization flow – from taxonomy design to tagging, back to taxonomy design, in a full loop.

But you’re pointing out rightly that there are solutions that can really empower and ease the burden on the IT professionals and information architects, the knowledge managers who otherwise have to integrate all these individual systems via API. The end-to-end Squirro + Synaptica offering reduces this sizeable effort before the system can even begin to work.

JH: We have a development staff because we do these types of projects on behalf of clients. Our developers are always looking for new challenges. They will come to us and say, “we have to do this again?!” They want products that take care of the simple things so that they can add value with more complex solutions. I love that mindset because, again, our clients want to do more with us, so our team doesn’t worry about having the work. What they worry about is doing cool and interesting things. Building the same connector 20 times, doing the same work over and over again is not cool.

SD: I have always believed you don’t want your data scientist running queries for a taxonomist that could be a button in a product. You want your data scientist diving into all the rich data that the product can provide through cultivation of a knowledge graph. That’s where they should spend their time. That’s where they’re enthralled and where the business value comes from. You’ve described the quandary on the development side as well – what are those developers *not* doing because they have to build basic plumbing that should be productized and ready to go out-of-the box. Hopefully, your development team has a lot more exciting things to do in the year ahead.

JH: It’s so neat to build something new or do something incredible – something that’s meaningful for our clients. A lot of consulting firms forget this. They look for easy repeatable work that earn as much profit as possible. Our assumption is: if we do something that has an impact, our clients will always find more work for us. They want to work with our team at EK. It becomes a partnership.

SD: Truly partnership rather than transactional relationship. That’s wonderful. In addition to being a consultant, I know you host a podcast, you’ve written books, you speak at events – tell us about these opportunities to be a thought leader.

JH: Our Podcast is called Knowledge Cast and it is the leading podcast on Knowledge Management. I host a section of it focused on technology vendors. The goal of my section is to let our vendors talk in a positive way about their products. As far as I’m concerned, it can be a commercial, and the reason I say that is we want to offer our clients and listeners a chance to hear about all the great tools that are out there. We want them to hear about them from the vendors themselves.

I don’t know if there’s any thought leadership there other than getting smart people to talk about their products and share their passion. I see us as just a communication vehicle.

But with speaking at conferences and writing the book. That’s really been fun.

I reflect on this every once in a while. When we started I led a lot of our technical design work. But that’s changed.  Most of the new ideas we have from a technical standpoint don’t come from me anymore. For nearly 10 years, we have had an internal knowledge sharing session that we run every two weeks with the team. It starts with company updates, but most of the time is spent on someone sharing something cool they have done with a client. These meetings contribute to our culture of people producing new ideas.

I’m becoming the person that talks about the exciting ideas that the EK team as a whole has generated. I’m not always the one who originates the idea anymore. In this way, I think of myself not as a thought leader but more as a communicator of thoughts.

We all teach and learn from each other. It’s a message I share with our clients.  We talk about the power of EK as a whole. Our clients get more than the people on the project. We have communities of practice where all our people share ideas and knowledge (within the bounds of confidentiality and data security, of course).

SD: Thinking about the client partnerships that lie ahead for you, what do you see as the big challenges for the sector and industry that you’re going to be helping your clients solve?

JH: This brings me back to the semantic layer.

I know everyone’s focused on AI. Everyone seems to be running fast,  trying to figure out what they are doing. We see a lot of companies building their own RAG solutions. They think they can do this internally and run into a typical pattern of problems. Depending on the size of the company, they launch something in 8 to 10 weeks. Some larger enterprise clients take longer.

The response is amazing when it is initially launched. Pretty quickly, though, the users start seeing problems like hallucinations and start to lose faith in the tool. Another four weeks go by, and they realize they should have worked with an expert. This is when companies like Squirro and EK get a phone call.

Product vendors are building robust RAG tools. They are spending time, resources, and tuning their solutions to build something strong, reliable, and trustworthy. Many of those clients that started on their own realize that they should have used experts who can ensure that the solution is fast, reliable, and trustworthy. In a way, this is very similar to what we saw with data lakes. Organizations said “we’re going to put all our data in a data lake that’ll solve everything. It’s all in one place so that we can find what we need.” They launched and quickly found that they still can’t find anything.

We need to start thinking of AI in a smarter way and not repeat the errors of the Data Lake era. In the next couple of years, as more companies understand how much it takes to do information management in the right way – in a way that isn’t limited by a structure that people are stuck with but rather an organizational structure that aligns with the way people think – as we move to this future, it’s going to be quite a ride.

Synaptica Insights is our popular series of use cases sharing stories, news, and learning from our customers, partners, influencers, and colleagues. You can review the full list of Insight interviews online.