Enterprise Information Access and Navigation: "Connect To KnowledgeTM!"
™™™In fast-changing competitive environments, an enterprise maintains its competitiveness by cultivating the potential of its DNA. The accelerated commoditization of goods and manufacturing through global markets is now pushing companies to be better at delivering high-value services, perfect execution and drive world-class innovation based on the knowledge accumulated of the course of their history. This is "enterprise DNA." Intellectual property, corporate information, knowledge and know-how can be regarded as the "nucleotides" that make up the enterprise DNA.
Enterprise DNA is buried deep in huge volumes of information and knowledge distributed across systems and (probably more importantly) experienced and talented teams and individuals. Considering the exponential growth of this information, the goal must be to build and maintain comprehensive and secure access to enterprise DNA for employees, partners and customers, enabling them to make better informed business decisions with speed and accuracy.
The challenge is that the departmental information silos—the segmentation of tasks between departments and a static process-oriented approach, largely inherited from the post-industrial revolution—are a hindrance to the goal of global information access. An enterprise navigation search and retrieval (ENSR) solution is thus crucial for finding and tapping into enterprise DNA, overcoming these obstacles and achieving the highest degree of information accessibility and sharing.
To date, KM initiatives have had limited success because they have largely focused only on structuring, storing and finding information in a vast array of silos and repositories, rather than valuing it and making it flow across the organization to keep it alive and valuable.
From Enterprise Competitiveness to Employee Productivity
Information as the foundation of enterprise competitiveness. In the global fast-paced economy, enterprise competitiveness relies on the ability to anticipate, understand and follow market needs, innovate, deliver tailored value-added services and goods, maintain customer loyalty and control risk. These are key elements in maintaining high margins and long-lasting market leadership.
Challenge: the exponential growth of information. It is well known that the volume of information grows exponentially as the number of devices, channels, types of information and persons with whom to communicate increase. As a result, terabytes of information stored in hundreds of heterogeneous systems are the norm for any reasonably sized business. Giving a simple, easy-to-use access point to employees, who themselves belong to dozens of disjointed access-control systems, adds to the complexity of the problem. However, one crucial point often missed is that it is also critical to identify "those who know," and allowing people to contact others that own the information or have a connection (directly or more likely indirectly) with the information. This promotes better information sharing and collaboration.
The post-industrial revolution paradigm: a dead-end path. To leverage the value of enterprise DNA, many initiatives have been launched to harness information in formal processes and silos in a structured and controlled fashion (ECM, BPM). Though relevant, these approaches cover at best 5% to 10% of the information available, and because of this, face the challenge of obsolescence and poor adoption by the users. Given the lack of flexibility in these approaches, they also suffer from the growing cost of modification and maintenance just to keep up with the rapid evolution of information and the organization within which they sit. They have their place, but their use should be reserved for very specific and highly processed activities that are stable over time.
Application vendors have tried to address this by extending functionalities in silo applications with first-generation search engines based on mathematical models and statistics only. For the users who already know the information exists, but do not remember where, it is a useful commodity feature, but does little to address strategic issues and is not flexible enough to give access to enterprise DNA.
Individual performance and collaboration are the key enablers of the modern enterprise 2.0. We should not forget that in many business contexts (and despite the best efforts of some of the established players in this market), employees are still spending 30% of their time looking for the relevant information necessary to do their jobs well. How well employees do their jobs has become highly dependent on the enterprise’s ability to enable and encourage collaboration, foster individual productivity, boost creativity and improve reactivity to customer requests. Providing employees with a "secure broadband" connection to the enterprise DNA through ENSR that goes above and beyond organizational barriers and static processes is a mandatory requirement of a dynamic market-driven modern enterprise 2.0.
This is the challenge for enterprise navigation search and retrieval solutions. ENSR is not just about finding raw information; it is as much about the people and teams that sit behind it and tapping into their collective knowledge.
Indeed, information stored in silos over the course of a companies’ history ia made of explicit information such as company policies and rules, provided not for information, but for strict application. It is usually fairly well maintained, organized, known and just needs to be accessible and valued.
However, the majority (and endlessly growing) part of information landscape is the implicit unstructured information from sources such as progress reports, meeting minutes, memo, project planning, customer feedback, claim resolution follow-up, marketing campaign reports, laboratory experimentation results, etc. These are hugely valuable to the enterprise, as they tend to refer to people and their roles, and provide insight to their experience and involvement.
Whether writing a proposal, planning work, defining product requirements or delivering projects, employees need to make the best possible decision—sometimes at very short notice. Having access to experienced people with solid field experience can be hugely valuable and can avoid costly mistakes. A multipurpose semantic technology must find information AND identify the right people across the organization, beyond organizational boundaries and across geographies. It must also be able to recognize employee mobility, turnover and the myriad of formal and informal networks that are created and evolve on a daily basis.