About The Knowledge Engineers

Try to find out how many companies in any country actually use a CRM. You will land on a statistics page citing a second statistics page citing a vendor blog post citing a survey that is either unnamed, unpublished or a decade old. The number gets repeated until it sounds like a fact. Nobody can check it, and by then nobody tries.

That is a solvable problem, and the solution is boring: go to the primary source, say which one it was, say when it was measured, and publish the method next to the finding. Every report on this site is generated from a named dataset by a script that lives in the same repository as the site, so a figure can be traced back to the row it came from. If we cannot source it, we do not publish it.

• Industry reports. Long-form data reports with numbered data points, each carrying its source, reference period and a confidence label. 13 of them so far, covering 667 figures.
• The market data index. Every figure we have published, in one table, downloadable as CSV and JSON, free to quote with attribution.
• Software advice. Ranked category guides to 1875 products, written for the point in a buying process where the shortlist has to become a decision.

• Primary sources only. If a figure comes from a statistics office, a regulator or a company filing, we cite that. We do not cite an article citing it.
• Reproducible by construction. The reports are built by scripts that query the source and write the page, so a reader can rerun the query and land on our number.
• The period is part of the fact. A figure without a reference period is not a figure, it is a rumour, so the year travels with every number we print.
• Confidence is stated, not implied. Verified, directional or single source. We would rather label a number honestly than round it into confidence it has not earned.
• Corrections are public. When we get something wrong we fix it and say so on the page rather than editing quietly.

The full method is on the how we work page.

Research that hides its funding is marketing. Ours works four ways, all of them stated on the services page and disclosed wherever they touch a page you are reading:

• Commissioned and syndicated reports. Paid research, published with the commissioner named on the page, permanently.
• Data licensing. Access to series and cuts beyond the free index.
• Commissioned product analysis. A vendor can commission an analysis of their own product. The page names who paid for it, and the judgements in it stay ours.
• Paid visibility in a ranked list. It affects where and how prominently a product appears and nothing else, it is disclosed directly above every ranking, and those links carry nofollow, so none of the ranking credit a search engine might otherwise pass moves with the money.

What none of it buys is the wording of a page, sight of a report before publication, or the removal of a competitor. Read the disclosure for the long version.

5 people write, edit and fact-check everything here, each taking a different role on every page, so nobody both writes and signs off the same work. Which role falls to whom is fixed per page, so a page keeps the same names when it is rebuilt.

If a figure on this site is wrong, we want to know, and it does not matter whether you are a reader, a competitor or the vendor being criticised. Send the page, the claim and the evidence to business@gcas-digital.com. Factual errors are corrected and the correction is noted on the page. Disagreements about our judgement are answered honestly and usually not resolved, which is what judgement means.

The Knowledge Engineers is published by G-Cas B.V., Fladderiepvliet 3, 3545 AJ Utrecht, Netherlands, registered with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce under KvK 42008661. Reach us at business@gcas-digital.com or through the contact form.

A knowledge engineer builds the part of a system that can answer a question: taking what is known but scattered — sitting in people's heads, in reports nobody reads, behind the twelfth menu of a statistics office — and putting it somewhere it can be looked up and checked. That is a fair description of the work here, and it is where the name comes from.

The name was also already on the door. Until 2019 this domain belonged to The Knowledge Engineers Network Limited, a British company that ran digital training for marketers, agencies and media owners. It stopped publishing here in the spring of 2019, the registration lapsed, and we later bought the domain. We are not that company, we have no connection to the people who ran it, and none of their material is republished on this site. If you came looking for their courses: they are not here, and we have no way to pass a message on.