Emmanuel Esquieu reflects on Knowmore's 20th anniversary
Our ambition was to place employees at the heart of successful digital transformation for businesses and organizations. Emmanuel Esquieu. Co-founder and CEO
Knowmore turns 20!
This is an opportunity to look back at the key milestones in the company's development. Emmanuel Esquieu, CEO of Knowmore, granted us an exclusive interview.
How did the idea to create Knowmore come to you? What is the origin story of the company?
Emmanuel Esquieu (E.E): Initially, my job involved deploying IT applications and addressing the challenges of training, supporting, and assisting users of large Information Systems. At the time, 20 years ago, we provided training using school-based systems or dedicated training environments, allowing future users to practice before working on the real application. However, when training users, we would write course materials that sometimes had to be sent to 10,000 people. These documents were almost never read and were difficult to update, even when made available on an intranet.
It was long, complex, and costly. The idea of creating IT application simulators quickly emerged.
From the founding of Knowmore in 2001, we began developing a first solution K-STUDIO. K-STUDIO, also known as an authoring tool, allows for cloning screens, data, and behaviors of an application to create interactive training content to help tens of thousands of users – millions today – train on complex and expensive IT applications. Of course, it was necessary to integrate instructional messages directly into the simulator.
The solution's flexibility, its adaptability to the schedules of trained audiences, and its constant availability make it an ideal tool for continuous training, consolidating, and securing transformation. N.M. Deputy General Manager, in charge of transformation projects at ANRU Agency
Very quickly, we understood that we could and needed to go further to support users at their workstations, after training. The operating procedures offered in applications' online help, when available, are not always easily applicable. It is common for users to search for a business rule or a document to enter the correct information into their application. Users need to be alerted when they perform a business action... The ambition was to have all this information in real-time, readily available directly within their application, and for everyone.
In hindsight, our ambition was to place the employee at the heart of successful digital transformation for businesses and organizations. English speakers today call this the user centric.
Knowmore then embarked on the development of a second solution K-NOW to offer dynamic help and operating procedures overlaid on business applications, so that users have real-time information and guidance, whenever they need it. The idea of the "application GPS" was bornWe began experimenting with it at France Télécom. At the time, we called this solution digital coaching; in 2019, 18 years later, Gartner designated this market as DAP: Digital Adoption Platform. It works on the same principle as a car's GPS: K-NOW guides the user, like a colleague who would train and guide them step-by-step, within their application. It can be said that Knowmore is a precursor to DAP solutions, and certainly the first publisher to have created and commercialized an application GPS.
When was Knowmore founded?
E.E : Knowmore was founded in May 2001.
What were the key milestones in Knowmore's growth?
E.E : After initiating the pilot of K-NOW from 2001 at France Telecom, in 2003 and 2004, a second client, a major international bank, entrusted us with supporting them on what was certainly the largest banking project in France to date. With K-STUDIO, we delivered 250 interactive training modules to train 15,000 users on their new workstations. This was a true success, which also allowed us to win our first award: the CEGOS Awards for the 1st E-Learning Project in the Deployment category.
Building on this great success, we gained the trust and secured several significant projects in the Banking and Insurance sectors. I would like to thank our clients, who remain with us to this day.
As projects and demands evolved, we had to structure the Knowmore teams. We recruited new developers to always be at the forefront of innovation and strengthened our technical team to meet the increasingly demanding requirements of our key clients' business and IT teams. Knowmore has worked on over 200 different applications and collaborative tools. I am proud to have retained and developed, in particular, our long-standing employees who, having experienced the evolution of IT over the past 20 years, are capable of advising the IT teams of the largest corporations. I am also very happy to have welcomed Knowmore employees from diverse backgrounds over the years, who contribute daily to listening to and always better serving our clients.
This wealth of expertise, combined with the new demands from our clients and the market, has allowed us to regularly enhance our solutions.
In 2007, Knowmore acquired a company specializing in the knowledge management, to create synergy with our solutions.
In 2014, we won new innovation awards, such as the Orange Digital Awards, and the Change Management trophies with Michelin and Oracle.
In 2019, in co-innovation with a major aerospace player, inspired by Lean Management, we developed our 3rd solution K-VALUE. K-VALUE provides Dashboards and KPIs for theuser experience, user journeys, adoption rates, and thus provides the keys to optimize application usage.
This wealth of expertise, combined with the new demands from our clients and the market, has allowed us to regularly enhance our solutions.
What were the major challenges faced by Knowmore?
E.E: We have navigated three major crises:
In 2001, at the launch of Knowmore, we experienced the dot-com bubble crisis. It wasn't the best time to start a company! We had to be agile and innovative to survive that initial challenge.
We had to face the subprime crisis of 2008-2009. Over 50% of our clients were banks. Once again, we had to be creative and find new avenues for growth. In addition to this external expansion, we turned to new sectors of activity.
And then, like many, we have been facing the health crisis since 2020. Nevertheless, thanks to the measures taken and our loyal customers, our strategy has paid off, and we have seen growth of over 200% in Digital Adoption over 3 years.
It is true, however, that for almost 15 years, Knowmore worked hard to educate the market. Large companies perfectly understood the advantages of K-STUDIO. Academies and Training Departments struggled to see K-NOW as a solution for continuously upskilling users on business applications or collaborative tools throughout their professional lives within the company. Our market began to mature about 5 years ago. We are seeing growing interest across all sectors, not only from key accounts, mid-sized companies (ETI), and the public sector, but also from software publishers and Consulting and Integration firms.
Who are Knowmore's clients adopting your solutions, and why?
E.E: From its inception, Knowmore has worked with key accounts. Today, we support 40% of CAC40 companies, public services such as the Ministries of National Education, the Armed Forces... For the most part, our clients are organizations across all sectors with tens of thousands of users. We support over 1.2 million users, employees, and partners of our clients in France and abroad.
All companies and organizations face the same challenge: how to achieve lasting digital transformation. Regardless of their sector or size, organizations must solve a complex equation. How to deal with: the proliferation of CRM, ERP, and other applications; the low adoption of these applications and constantly challenged user engagement; the need to onboard employees quickly, whether they are new hires or have changed positions; different generational expectations regarding digital support... Not to mention the advent of SaaS solutions, which lead to regular application updates, forcing users to constantly adapt to perform their business tasks.
Our solutions offer an innovative and proven answer to this challenge. We help organizations prepare their users through practice and training to understand application changes. Furthermore, once in a real work situation, we facilitate users' actions to accomplish their business tasks. Finally, by engaging in a continuous improvement process, project teams and product managers can measure the actual usage of their applications to implement corrective actions and optimize digital adoption. The savings generated and user engagement observed by our clients are very significant. Some of our clients even act as our spokespeople within their organizations to present the benefits of our tools.
Our long-standing client has deployed our application GPS on over 110 different applications.
We reached the 110th application by the end of 2020! We would like to sincerely thank the entire Knowmore team for their work and the assistance they provide us. Without you, we would never have reached such a large number of applications! Orange. Business Department
Which departments are leading digital adoption projects?
E.E: This varies depending on the companies and organizations. However, these projects are most often led by Digital Transformation Departments, Change Management Departments, or IT Departments. More recently, we've observed that they are also managed by Training Academies or Training Departments.
Do you see a change in your market before and after the health crisis?
E.E: The health crisis, due to remote work, has reinforced the use of our solutions, particularly our application GPS. Our solutions are considered a new communication medium. Indeed, our GPS can communicate the information any user is looking for, anywhere in the world. Our simulator can also be used remotely, regardless of bandwidth issues.
How do you see Knowmore in 3 years?
E.E: Great!
Our ambition is to solidify our position as the French leader and become the European leader in digital learning and adoption.
All indicators are green. By 2025, 70% of companies worldwide will adopt a solution like ours (source Gartner).
The facts confirm our vision.
Knowmore's key objective is to increase our market visibility, commensurate with our product expertise and client portfolio.
We continue our investments and dedicate 15% of our annual budget to R&D. Our credo is innovation for our clients. Furthermore, we are fully open to co-innovation, which we already practice with some of our clients.
We are strengthening our partnerships with major consulting and integration firms, who now routinely incorporate our tools into their tender responses. And for the past 12 months, we have been responding to the growing demand from software and business application publishers.
For our 20th anniversary, I wanted to organize a big celebratory event to thank our clients, partners, and employees—in short, everyone who trusts us, and without whom we would never have come this far.
However, the health crisis had other plans… It's only postponed!
We have many projects underway! And we can't wait to present them to you.
Many thanks to Emmanuel Esquieu for this interview. We'll be back soon with a new article.