Enabling Search-driven Knowledge Management

Human knowledge is oftentimes identified as an organization’s most valuable asset. However, much of this knowledge is never shared or truly re-used. Capturing and re-distributing this knowledge not only improves knowledge workers’ productivity, but it can also have a measurable impact on the top line. Information discovery solutions powered by an enterprise search platform can greatly simplify information access and reduce the amount of time knowledge workers must spend searching for information.

Knowledge management has been a persistent, high-priority item on the business and IT development agendas for the past eight to 10 years. Most large organizations have implemented knowledge management in an attempt to organize and disseminate corporate knowledge and achieve the elusive "learning organization" nirvana. They were hoping to achieve specific outcomes, such as improved performance, shared intelligence, competitive advantage and higher levels of innovation. But for the most part, these efforts have been futile. Two major issues have been plaguing these projects: firstly, the knowledge management initiatives have had too much of a production focus. They do not adequately take into account the need for information to be consumed in a manner that knowledge workers want, which is often serendipitously. Lateral and unexpected information discovery is far more valuable than structured knowledge management.

Secondly, the organizational efforts that facilitate dissemination and encourage participation have been limited. It is just too hard to contribute and there is often little incentive. During the next five years, organizations will shift their investments away from legacy knowledge management and toward Enterprise 2.0, enterprise search, information discovery and other tools, technologies, practices and processes that allow for emergent work patterns to form in a vibrant "learning organization."

Is KM the Big Brother of Information Management?
Knowledge management is quite an overused term. There are a number of definitions for it. In many cases, knowledge management is still interpreted and defined as simply improved information management. This happened even more frequently at the early stages of knowledge management. Typically, this kind of thinking is driven by the "so what is actually new here?" types of questions, which often represent the key challenge to knowledge management sponsors that are typically found in existing departmental functions (the human resource or IT department) or completely new functions (the knowledge management office).

It is important to note that information management is increasingly critical to use and make sense of the proliferation of digital content. However, even though information management (enabled by knowledgebases, expert systems, content management, document management, etc.) and information access and discovery (enabled by enterprise search) are some of the key enablers of knowledge management and do play a pivotal role in this context, they do not often suffice for knowledge management.

Knowledge and information management are the core elements of scaling knowledge-centered organizations. As businesses grow, they oftentimes experience a set of challenges, common to many organizations across a number of different industries. Through a common charter and a set of objectives, standards, practices and processes around both knowledge management and information management, organizations can significantly increase their ability to manage and control their intellectual capital and knowledge, addressing some of their growth pains and directly increasing the reusability and sharing of their key information assets.

Collaboration is the marriage between knowledge management and information management. Creating, storing, tagging, etc. information assets are of value for a single user. However, they are of a significantly higher benefit for the immediate workgroup, also delivering ultimate value to the enterprise as a whole. Enterprise search and information access and discovery technologies will bring significant value to an overall knowledge management solution, even though they cannot replace collaboration elements.

Addressing Knowledge Management Needs
Knowledge management is not a pure technology issue, even though technologies, which enhance knowledge sharing and growth, do play a role. It is also about the content, and it is definitely about creating an environment where learning takes place. Instead of having an excessive focus on only having a content repository or knowledgebase in place, stimulating collaboration is of critical importance. The fundamental issue to consider here is how the organization needs to be designed to facilitate knowledge processes.

As discussed above, compelling technology is necessary to a good knowledge management program. Further, new technology is always emerging that advances the state of the art of knowledge management, making things possible that were not possible before.

Knowledge management is not a single class of technology. In fact, it uses several categories of technology that enable the creation, capture and sharing of information for use in knowledge-intensive processes. Enterprise content management systems, for example, are used by many organizations to capture explicit knowledge. With the addition of metadata, taxonomies and search capabilities, document-centric information can be widely used to share the knowledge of a few with many people in an organization or outside to partners and customers. Other examples include enterprise search and information access platforms, which include sophisticated categorization and classification engines that enable users to encode rules about how particular information management processes should be run. Lighter-weight Web 2.0 tools, such as discussion databases, wikis and blogs, also offer important ways to capture knowledge. These systems are already in wide use in many organizations, either in the context of knowledge management programs or for other purposes. From an emerging technologies standpoint, it is also becoming more important to be able to capture and use non-text-based data formats, such as audio and video.

Enterprise Search Helps KM Become Information Discovery
Enterprise search helps organizations maximize the value of their information assets for both the creator and the consumer by consolidating a wide variety of structured, unstructured, and rich media sources into a uniform knowledge repository, and to make access to them both channel-agnostic and channel-optimized. It is possible for the user to get to the information regardless of the channel she chooses, and it will be accessible in the way that takes best advantage of any given channel.