Strategic Trigger

Global Practice Silos Freeze Critical Firmwide Collaboration

As FTI Consulting expanded globally, critical institutional knowledge became trapped in thousands of disconnected personal drives, local servers, and email inboxes. This fragmentation severely impacted operational efficiency. Consultants were spending up to 20% of their time recreating existing methodologies, leading to redundant efforts and inconsistent client deliverables across different regions. Leadership recognized that this “reinvention of the wheel” was not only draining profitability but also creating dangerous operational bottlenecks, as vital subject matter expertise often remained isolated within specific teams, inaccessible to the rest of the organization.

FTI’s executive leadership recognized that this localized approach to knowledge management was fundamentally unsustainable for a global consulting powerhouse. They understood that to maintain their competitive edge, the firm needed to transition from a culture of information hoarding to one of active knowledge sharing. Leadership committed to a comprehensive digital transformation centered around a centralized, searchable repository. This strategic imperative aimed to break down geographic and departmental silos, standardize methodologies, and ensure that every consultant could leverage the full collective expertise of the global firm.

Stakes

Inaccessible Knowledge Escalates Compliance and Liability Risks

The absence of a centralized repository posed severe financial risks and compromised regulatory compliance. Without standardized storage and retention policies, locating critical documents during litigation or internal audits was slow and sometimes impossible. This directly escalated legal spoliation risks, where failure to produce required documentation could lead to substantial court sanctions and adverse legal findings against the firm. Furthermore, the reliance on fragmented local drives made the firm increasingly vulnerable to data loss from hardware failure or unauthorized access, threatening intellectual property valuable to FTI and its clients.

The long-term reputational and strategic risks were equally severe. Failure to quickly access the firm’s deep expertise across its global network was eroding FTI’s reputation for rapid, authoritative response in complex, high-stakes situations. Clients hire FTI for their comprehensive global insights, yet the lack of a shared knowledge base meant clients often received localized expertise rather than the full might of the firm’s collective experience. This inability to leverage global capabilities consistently not only threatened long-standing client relationships but also limited the firm’s ability to win new complex, cross-border engagements.

Constraints and Complexity

Migrating Decades of Unstructured Data Without Disrupting Operations

The primary constraint was the sheer volume and complexity of the existing data environment. Over two decades of operation had yielded petabytes of unstructured data, spread across thousands of personal drives, local servers, and outdated SharePoint 2010 sites. This data included critical engagement reports, legal briefs, and client data, much of it holding significant regulatory or historical value. The organizational complexity was equally daunting; distinct practice groups had developed customized workflows and taxonomies over many years, making standardization across the firm a difficult and delicate internal alignment exercise.

The data migration challenge was exceptionally complex. The migration required consolidating heterogeneous data structures and cleansing legacy information while maintaining strict security, metadata, and versioning protocols. FTI’s operations are highly sensitive to disruption; any system downtime during the cutover would directly impact billable client hours. The transition required migrating enormous datasets in phases while simultaneously implementing a new governance model and metadata schema to ensure the new SharePoint environment would not degrade back into an unmanageable repository over time.

Selection Rationale

Senior Microsoft Specialists with Proven Delivery Depth

FTI Consulting initially evaluated several generalist consulting firms and offshore outsourcing providers. These alternatives proved inadequate due to their shallow understanding of complex SharePoint migrations and their focus on ‘lift-and-shift’ approaches, which would have merely replicated FTI’s existing organizational problems in a new environment. FTI needed more than just technical expertise; they required a partner with deep strategic knowledge of modern information architecture, automated governance, and complex large-scale data cleansing to truly resolve the root causes of their information silos.

FTI chose i3solutions because they provided specialized Microsoft Gold Partner expertise, with an exclusive focus on complex content management solutions. As a senior-only team, entirely US-based with over 600 successful implementations since 1997, i3solutions delivered the specific depth and maturity FTI required. i3solutions went beyond simple file migration, developing custom automated tools for metadata extraction, deduplication, and automated governance. This ensured that FTI’s new SharePoint environment was not just a storage location, but a robust, searchable repository designed for long-term scalability and security.

The Enterprise Challenge

FTI Consulting is a multi-disciplined consulting firm with leading practices in financial restructuring, litigation support, engineering, and scientific investigation. As a growing organization, FTI recognized the critical need for seamless collaboration, real-time knowledge sharing, and leveraging existing intellectual property to maintain a competitive edge. Effective communication across divisions was essential to ensure employees had access to the right information at the right time.

FTI’s existing infrastructure had not kept pace with the firm’s growth and increasingly complex knowledge-sharing requirements. Documents lived in personal and team drives. Expertise was invisible across divisions – finding who knew what required informal networks rather than a governed system. A company acquisition added an entirely new set of staff and content that had no clear integration path into the existing knowledge environment. i3solutions built a modern SharePoint-based intranet that centralized knowledge management, enabled cross-division collaboration, and integrated the acquired firm’s staff and content into a single governed platform.

The Engagement Approach

Technical Transformation

Measurable Outcomes

Who This Engagement Serves