Knowledge Management – By Any Other Name

What does this have to do with investment banking and M&A activity? Simply put, this conference was indicative of the interest, budgets, and desire to implement technical solutions (and non-technical – after all, this IS knowledge management, an area which we know is hampered more by cultural than technical issues) for a variety of problems. Additionally, this industry event illuminated some of the specific areas of focus and, in some cases, vendors that are in demand in these spaces.

One could see several specific areas of interest and implementation across the attendees, all of whom were from Global 1000 and large federal government organizations. These included:

• Collaboration: instant messaging (IM) and team ware (also known as shared or virtual workspaces) were on everyone’s lips and lists. The ability to work together in project-focused groups and to find someone based on experience/expertise and contact them were quite popular. There were numerous Microsoft and Sharepoint stories, many of them about an attempt to control implementations. QuickPlace was also well thought of, though there was much fear about IBM’s focus on it relative to its promotion of Workplace. Generally, the ability to link people together relative to their needs and particular contexts were much more important than they used to be.
• Document Management: the audience was fairly split in its view of document management vs. collaboration as the starting point. In either case, however, there was no question that ultimately, a document repository needed to be in place for a wide variety of users and uses. The prospects for vendors that can supply a scalable, easy-to-use capability – these include Microsoft (with Sharepoint, to an extent), Oracle, Xerox and potentially other emerging vendors like Alfresco (open source document management) will increasingly be in demand (despite the entrenchment of vendors like EMC/Documentum, FileNet, and others).
• Search: still synonymous with knowledge management for many people, this group – perhaps due to its seasoning was well spoken with regard to ontology, taxonomy, etc. Generally speaking, the importance of tagging and metadata was apparent as was the confusion about which vendors could best return the most contextually relevant results (with or without metadata). Autonomy and Verity (now the same company) and FAST were the vendors that had been implemented most often. However, there was also a strong demand to go beyond that in terms of taxonomy and categorization, though users are typically unwilling to sacrifice usability and incur higher costs to obtain them. Most organizations continue to seem either unsatisfied or under-penetrated with search technology; news that bodes well for challengers like Endeca, Vivisimo, and others.
• The new media – blogs and wikis: While not overwhelmingly supported, there were a fair number of users that were experimenting with these forms of web publishing and collaboration. Generally, people agreed that regardless of the medium, governance must be established to ensure some level of oversight of the information being disseminated. Given a level of control, blogs and wikis can be very valuable and fairly inexpensive ways to enable organizations to publish continually and to provide a means for teams to share information easily.

Given the ongoing proclivity for organizations to distribute their work forces, continued outsourcing of functions and business processes, the aging of the workforce, and the progress being made in the supporting technology areas, KM and collaboration activities and implementations will become more critical, no matter what names they are given.