Topic

This session is intended for anyone working across knowledge, intranet, or standardisation initiatives who is trying to make complex knowledge environments easier for people to navigate and use in their work.

When people are trying to get their work done, they are not thinking about knowledge ecosystems. They are asking something far simpler. Where do I go? What can I trust? Is this the right thing to use?

This session shares a programme of work that brought together the Standardisation Library and the evolution of Aurecon’s Knowledge Hubs. The starting point will feel familiar. Standardised materials, knowledge hubs and community spaces all existed, each valuable in its own right, but not always experienced as a connected whole. As the organisation’s structure evolved and the platform matured, it became less clear how these pieces should come together.

The session will cover:

• a realistic, experience-led way to improve clarity and findability in a complex and fragmented knowledge environment
• the practical role of a Standardisation library, how you build trust in it and how community spaces sit alongside it
• governance approaches that support consistency without centralised ownership

At its core, this is a story about what happens when you stop designing for knowledge ecosystems and start designing for the person standing in front of one, just trying to do their job.

Profile

There is a gap in most organisations between what they collectively know and what any individual can actually do with that knowledge. Farrah Abdullah has spent her career building bridges across it.

As a Senior Knowledge Consultant at Aurecon, she designs the systems, structures and ways of working that make expertise genuinely findable across a global engineering, design and advisory practice. Her focus is not knowledge for its own sake but making sure knowledge moves, that it reaches the right person at the right time and improves their capacity to apply it.

Farrah’s approach draws on a rare combination of knowledge management, communications and organisational change theory. The thread running through all of it is a belief that structure, done well, is an act of generosity. It gives people back their time, their clarity and their capacity to think.

She believes that when people can find what they need, something shifts in the whole organisation. Her work is about making that shift possible, one structure at a time.