Over the past thirty years knowledge Management (KM) may have floated in and out of fashion several times, but it has remained critical within many organisations. For example, within the professional services and pharmaceuticals space KM has remained an essential ingredient that supports client delivery, problem solving, new product development, customer service, institutional and professional learning, winning new work, and more.  KM and related practices also help to drive search and findability, and more recently are helping to establish the foundations for AI success.

In the 2025 Intranet and Digital Workplace Awards there was an exceptional example of knowledge management in action.  Global pharmaceutical Roche has created a highly ambitious knowledge-sharing platform called the Digital Workspace (DWS), which addresses critical KM use cases through a series of innovative apps and modules. It’s an inspiring example of what can be achieved within a knowledge platform today.

Now in their nineteenth year, the Intranet and Digital Workplace Awards recognise outstanding contributions to the fields of intranets, digital workplaces and digital employee experience from all over the world. The awards uncover remarkable solutions that deliver business value, sharing them with the wider community. We were delighted to award the team at Roche our Platinum award, reflecting the single entry that was most admired by our judging panel.

About Roche’s Digital Workspace (DWS)

Roche is a global pharmaceutical firm headquartered in Switzerland that employees over 100,000 people around the world. Within Roche, the Product Development (PD) department plays a critical role in bringing unique medicines to market. It’s 6,000 employees conduct global clinical trials, analyse results, monitor safety, collaborate with regulatory authorities and more.

Roche’s Product Development Knowledge Management (PDKM) team are tasked with supporting employees in this critical mission to bring new medicines to patients. They are committed to improving how people share and utilise knowledge and information and have established a knowledge management ecosystem comprising digital products, services, and supporting organisations. This ecosystem is designed to enhance Roche’s ability to capture, organise, and share knowledge across various departments and teams.

At the centre of all this is the Digital Workspace (DWS), a flagship platform that integrates diverse knowledge sources to streamline work processes, overcome information silos and better utilise skills, ultimately making collaboration easier and accelerating decision-making. The DWS seeks to enabling employee to quickly access the information they need, connect with colleagues who have the relevant expertise, and share knowledge throughout the organisation, all through a highly tailored and cohesive experience.

Bringing innovation to KM

The DWS is a wholly custom-built platform, currently based on the Outsystems AI-powered development platform and the Sinequa search. It has evolved over a number of years through continual improvement and continues to expand through a series of “knowledge apps” that solve complex KM issues. These apps are surfaced on a personalised homepage.

The landing page for Roche’s Digital Workspace (DWS) knowledge platform. Screenshot appears courtesy of Roche.

At the heart of the solution is a powerful “universal search” that integrates multiple sources into one search experience including Google shared drives, various internal knowledge repositories, a publications database, Workday, intranet sites, the different DWG knowledge apps, and more. Furthermore, the search is already utilising AI and machine learning to make intelligent suggestions for content as users type, increase the relevance of items returned, and also personalise search results.

There are also a growing number of knowledge apps, including an intelligent Expert Finder that indexes the skills of 100,000 Roche employees in Workday, and also takes into account written contributions to the DWS and adjacent systems, community contributions around knowledge sharing, and peer endorsements of expertise.

Meanwhile there’s also an innovative Automated Query Management (AQM)”module that helps to regulate the vast number of queries that come in through emails, chats, and communities, often without proper regulatory oversight. This situation leads to duplicated efforts, inefficiencies, risks, and long wait times for employees seeking answers. The AQM module addresses these issues by acting as a centralised hub for managing queries, ensuring that every question is acknowledged and answered. It also features intelligent routing and prioritisation capabilities to direct queries to the right team or individual.

Other powerful apps within the DWS include:

• AskHub solution for more quickfire Q&A non-regulated questions
• comprehensive database of knowledge articles which subject matter experts can contribute to
• Outcome Collaboration Space containing information previous outcomes, outputs, lessons learned, and their impact

Why Roche won our Platinum award

The scale of ambition is impressive, trying to tackle some of the most complex and critical KM issues in a global pharmaceutical firm. We also love the extensive user research and strong foundational work that has gone into developing the solution. The number of integrations delivered through search and apps like the Expert Finder is also impressive.

There are also nice touches in the implementation of the solution, particularly how search is embedded into the apps, so when you submit a question to the AQM or AskHub it automatically suggests previous related questions and knowledge assets to ensure the question has not been previously tackled.

We also love the modular approach that has ensured the solution continues to expand and has enabled it to be extended to other parts of Roche beyond the Product Division. There’s also an admirable can-do, cross-functional approach that has contributed to the success of DWS – and the platform in turn encourages further collaboration.

The impact has also been truly impressive, for example with huge numbers of hours saved, reduced costs and improved processes. For example, 90% of all the questions on the AskHub are answered within one day. Meanwhile the AQM has introduced the number of queries directed to agents by 30% and also resulted in estimated cost savings of CHF 2 million annually.

Gain more insights!

Want to know more and gain insights into leading intranets and digital workplaces? The 2025 Intranet and Digital Workplace showcase report contains extensive details (and screenshots) on each of the 12 winning entries, including Roche. See what the winners have done, and how what they have done has made a lasting impact.