Knowledge managing

In this case, CGE&Y’s client’s legal department frequently uses outside counsel for a myriad of projects. The outside counsel delivers the work, but often, a few months later a similar situation comes up in which already-purchased work would have great value if workers knew it was at their disposal. The system CGE&Y is putting together will let the client find similar cases and find sources both within the company and among outside counsel who have expertise in the specific topic at hand.

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“[The system] lets them pull together the expertise, the recipe, the content, and the people they need very quickly,” Edwards explains. By reducing the need for outside-counsel hours, the KM-based system cuts costs for the client.

The technologies used for that project could have been cobbled together five years ago, but with the maturity of KM wares and an increased familiarity with the tenets of sound KM practice,CGE&Y’s present-day implementation better realizes the potential of these technologies.

Meeting KM demands

Other recent KM initiatives are powered by technologies that have recently become more solid and widely-used. The rise of XML, for example, may help ease the two most challenging aspects of initiating a KM implementation: how best to collect knowledge and how best to search what has been collected.

XML, which aids tremendously in sorting collected data, is a key component of products built by ClearForest, a New York-based developer of what it calls unstructured data management software for BI (business intelligence) applications. One of its products, ClearTag, scans unstructured documents using a pattern recognition engine and applies XML tags that plumb the context of the document, recognizing, for example, the who, what, when, and where described in the unstructured text, as well as how those facts are connected.

“A scheme without XML could achieve auto-tagging, but you wouldn’t have the integration with external documents that … have XML tags,” explains ClearForest CEO BarakPridor. To integrate without XML would require so much human intervention that it would likely be seen as a deal-breaker, leaving what Xerox’s Bauer calls the “digital landfill” unmined.

Pridor notes that recognition technology has also improved during the past five years, making entire categories of knowledge-enabling products more useful and certain kinds of applications incrementally more logical for deploying KM initiatives. Improved pattern recognition has boosted the value of desktop research consoles, enterprise analysis products such as ClearForest and Lotus’ Discovery Server, and search capabilities of offerings such as those from Autonomy, according to Dan Rasmus, vice president of Cambridge, Mass.-based Giga Information Group. It has also advanced expertise location systems from companies such as AskMe, Tacit, and Kamoon.

AskMe highlighted the value of this technology by improving the searching of stored knowledge by implementing a tipping factor in its Enterprise 6.7 software, released last month. The program is now integrated with Microsoft Office applications, allowing an end-user to highlight a term on a Web page or in a spreadsheet that he or she doesn’t understand, bring up a definition and expertise community window, and find both quick information and avenues for gaining a richer understanding of the subject matter, according to Stephen Pao, vice president of Bellevue, Wash.-based AskMe.

Stronger integration is also a key factor in the changes made to Open Text’s newest knowledge environments, including LiveLink Team Collaboration Suite. According to AnikGanguly, executive vice president of Waterloo, Ontario-based Open Text, the aim of the integration is to break down what he believes has been the single toughest barrier to successful KM deployments: the input barrier.

“People love the idea of going to a system and getting everything they want easily, but if you ask them to do a shred of input work, they recoil in horror,” Ganguly says. Although LiveLink has always had collaborative spaces, its newly integrated electronic whiteboard application not only encourages side-channel conversations but also documents questions and answers during a session and enables LiveLink to capture that data for later access. “It’s all in context,” Ganguly adds. “No one has to do any work to get the knowledge stored.”

Knowledge for the future

Some technologies not yet in the limelight promise to further shake up enterprise notions of KM by making it easier to collect information and to get users to use KM systems. Advances in all four functions that make up a KM system — gathering, organizing, refining, and distributing knowledge — are on the horizon.

For gathering knowledge, the proliferation of voice-mining applications is crucial to the future of KM. Industry experts estimate that three-quarters of all knowledge crucial to a company’s efforts is transmitted verbally; virtually none of this knowledge has been captured for use in KM implementations.

On the organization front, pattern-recognition efforts are expected to improve. Veterans such as ClearVision and Autonomy continue to grind away at the limits of binary code, and newcomers such as Inxight Software are likely to tackle data-organization problems at a slightly different angle.

Refining advances are being set up by a combination of better pattern recognition and continued XML adoption, according to Xerox’s Bauer. XML can be applied across an enterprise to create a vast network of data and relationships to be mined for purposes such as fine-tuning workflows in response to custom demands.

Now that KM-enabling technologies are being worked into a variety of applications, companies have the tools available to successfully build a KM strategy and thereby squeeze more value out of the expertise they have already in place. The challenge, however, is to inspire enterprises to make the workflow and process changes critical to KM success and to invest in the benefits of KM at a time when budgets remain tight.

“Too many executives are in survival mode, not investing anything in adding value,” Xerox’s Bauer says.

The irony is that, by not investing, executives may hinder their company’s chances of escaping the permafrost.