Knowledge Management

Week 9

Knowledge Management During the past couple of years Knowledge management

has been identified with document management business intelligence collaborative computing corporate portals, and any number of buzzwords.

But rather than a single product, knowledge management encompasses an overarching business strategy aimed at exposing and taking advantage of a company's information, experience, and expertise to serve customers better and respond quickly to changing market conditions

Definition Knowledge management is the name of a concept in which an

enterprise consciously and comprehensively gathers, organizes, shares, and analyzes its knowledge in terms of resources, documents, and people skills.

Knowledge management involves data mining and some method of operation to push information to users.

Some vendors are offering products to help an enterprise inventory and access knowledge resources.

The Lotus Knowledge Discovery System, for example, advertises that it can locate and organize relevant content and expertise required to address specific business tasks and projects. It will analyze the relationships between content, people, topics, and activity, and produce a knowledge map report, based on a point system, that can be shared.

How it works

The Process The knowledge management process

includes four main activitiesGatheringOrganizingContextualizingDisseminating

Gathering Information

• Data entry • OCR and scanning • Voice input • Pulling information from various sources • Searching for information to include

Organizing

• Cataloging • Indexing • Filtering • Linking

Refining

• Contextualizing • Collaborating • Compacting • Projecting • Mining

Disseminating

• Flow • Sharing • Alert • Push

Document Management Systems

Just as important as the hard numbers found in sales reports are the so-called "soft" knowledge assets buried in text documents, spreadsheets, Web pages, and even e-mail.

Products are available called document management systems, they have enjoyed great success in the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, which require massive document-creation processes and document stores for patent and claims filings.

Documentum, Open Text Corp., and PC DOCS/Fulcrum, a division of Hummingbird, have dominated this space, offering products such as DocsFusion, Documentum 4i, and WorkSmart.

Document Management Systems

Typically, document management systems are two- or three-tiered, with the aim of preserving document integrity and document classification, so the user can find documents easily during searches. The first layer is usually a file server containing both the

documents and the classification information. The second consists of client software for accessing the system

(though this is increasingly handled by a Web browser). The third tier has to do with the business logic behind how

documents are created and routed to the appropriate individuals for editing and approval.

These systems are becoming browser-accessible, document management systems catering for both Intranet and Internet access.

Knowledge Management Plan A knowledge management plan involves a survey of

corporate goals and a close examination of the tools, both traditional and technical, that are required for addressing the needs of the company.

The challenge is to select or build software that fits the context of the overall plan and encourage employees to share information.

Developing a knowledge management plan means developing your business intelligence

Business Intelligence Understanding the external and internal forces

that affect your company requires focused, in-depth analysis, which is where business intelligence -- a knowledge management bellwether -- comes in.

Business intelligence consists of tools and technologies that generate surface-level and detailed reports and also provide the ability to drill down into hard-core data sources (this process is also known as data mining or e-analytics).

Business Intelligence Identifying overall trends, especially in terms of

sales information, is the unifying principle. High-powered databases are essential to any

business-intelligence implementation, as is a well-defined data structure.

These data structures, also known as data warehouses, are essentially clumps of databases that hold related information.

In addition, reporting engines, report- building software, and ad-hoc query tools can be found in any business intelligence arsenal.

Solution Providers Though many companies populate this space,

Brio Technology, Business Objects SA, Cognos, Hyperion Solutions Corp., IBM Corp., and Seagate Software are market leaders.

Ardent Software, maker of DataStage, was recently acquired by Informix Corp. and has also emerged as a formidable player -- as have several e-business–oriented companies, such as InterWorld Corp. and NetGenesis Corp..

Portals Portal is a term, generally synonymous with

gateway, for a World Wide Web site that is or proposes to be a major starting site for users when they get connected to the Web or that users tend to visit as an anchor site.

There are general portals and specialized or niche portals. Some major general portals include Yahoo, Excite, Netscape, and America Online's AOL.com. Examples of niche portals include Garden.com (for gardeners), Fool.com (for investors), and SearchNT.com (for Windows NT administrators).

Portals A number of large access providers offer

portals to the Web for their own users. Typical services offered by portal sites include

a directory of Web sites, a facility to search for other sites, news, weather information, e-mail, stock quotes, phone and map information, and sometimes a community forum.

The term portal space is used to mean the total number of major sites competing to be one of the portals.

Corporate Portal Think of a corporate portal as a

personalized Web portal, somewhat like My Yahoo! but with content and links specific to your company.

This home page can notify you of incoming e-mail, include a personalized calendar, display relevant news, and provide recent corporate memos.

Corporate Portal It can incorporate links to commonly used applications

and databases, such as the company's e-procurement system.

Further, although a corporate portal lets a company standardize the page in certain respects, individual employees can customize their views to include the items most relevant to them.

Most important, the corporate portal can function as a quick gateway to all the knowledge management systems employed by your company.