Maximizing the Value of Enterprise Content and Knowledge Assets

Without question, information drives business today. It is widely accepted that information represents the dominant opportunity to generate competitive advantage. A recent Columbia University study found that investments in intangible assets generate a return on investment eight times greater than similar investments in tangible assets. Consolidating this vast amount of information from a variety of departments, branches, and autonomous business units within a given region is one thing, but accomplishing it globally presents new and unique obstacles to fostering a complete enterprise view of content.

In the new economic reality, there are two strategic initiatives that organizations are undertaking more commonly in order to maximize the value of enterprise content and intellectual capital—knowledge management practices and enterprise information portals (EIP). The following article outlines these two initiatives and some of the key considerations associated with their deployment.

Knowledge Management

It has been well documented that knowledge management is 90% culture/people and 10% technology. Knowledge management requires a commitment to information sharing, collaboration, as well as a top-level mandate in order to deliver on its potential. Knowledge management can be defined simply as “The process of turning information into useful knowledge.” But what are the tools organizations need to develop the culture of the knowledge enterprise? What specific functionality should they look for in knowledge management technologies? Cultural challenges aside, what do organizations really need?

“Tools” of the Trade—The essential knowledge management “tools” include:

• Search and Retrieval—Full-featured advanced search technologies are required to access, manage, and organize information stored in many and varied sources throughout the enterprise. Intuitive yet powerful search capabilities that enable users to look for mission-critical information and have it presented in a variety of formats to suit their particular need or preference is essential.

  Superior search and retrieval tools are capable of indexing and accessing information stored in a wide range of business systems, e-mail packages, document management systems, file systems and other repositories, regardless of whether the information is structured or unstructured. This capability of accessing all types of data from a single search is also referred to as “federated search.”;

• Categorization—These tools are the lifeblood of knowledge management initiatives. They are a key building block in that they add context to content. These tools are capable of automatically generating business taxonomies (or leveraging and enriching an existing taxonomy if one exists), a comprehensive list of concepts or categories by which to organize enterprise content. Solid categorization engines develop an intuitive, precise “table of contents” that enables users to find the information they require faster by providing them with a contextual map of search results—organizing related information by similar theme or concept.;

• Crawlers and Agents—Another key feature of a knowledge management solution is the provision of “intelligent agents” capable of pushing required information to users. Agents allow users to define criteria or alerts or changes to documents, Web site content, or new information from other sources.

  Crawlers are enabling technologies that provide for Internet content and other external information sources to be included in user- and agent-based searches. This can also involve “brokered” searches whereby a search and retrieval solution brokers out searches to Internet-based search engines and then organizes those results as part of its own search.;

• Other Key Features—;

Document Summarization: Providing contextual summaries of documents, offering a “preview” format of the related result. This enables readers to see the document in a minimized form with search term highlighting (capsules and paragraphs with the search term query highlighted)—especially useful for lengthy documents.

Multiple Language Support: In today’s global economy, the ability to search and return result sets across a variety of not only major European languages but also Asian languages is essential.

Application “Hooks”: The ability of knowledge management tools to access and categorize enterprise business systems is critical. Hooks, or activators, that enable knowledge management technologies to index, categorize, retrieve, and display comprehensive, flexible result sets from packages such as Siebel, SAP, and J.D. Edwards are extremely valuable to organizations looking to ensure that the entire range of business content is available to knowledge workers conducting information-based activities.

Application Programming Interface (API): The ability of organizations to tailor knowledge management tools, including information search and retrieval and categorization tools, is essential. From an information search and retrieval perspective, this equates to enabling organizations to develop custom interfaces, leverage a variety of advanced features, and include natural language capabilities. From a categorization standpoint, API enables organizations to develop, manage, and modify business taxonomy, provide a variety of knowledge agents for users, and initiate supervised or unsupervised categorization, or a combination of the two to monitor and fine-tune the contextualization of enterprise content.

In sum, knowledge management tools are rapidly emerging as the primary means of leveraging business information. Combine these tools and techniques with the benefits and capabilities of an enterprise portal and organizations can begin truly realizing and capitalizing on the wealth of information available to them.

Enterprise Information Portal

As organizations move forward with their e-business initiatives, it is imperative that they not only consider the integrity, scalability, and openness of the solution, but also the ability to leverage existing IT infrastructure investments within the new model. Being able to seamlessly integrate mission-critical legacy applications, enterprise business packages, customer relationship management solutions, custom applications, and other vital systems, without extensive programming and architecture changes is of real benefit. Organizations are looking to the enterprise portal as the “touch point” for achieving these goals.

Similar to the caveats of knowledge management—that cultural issues must be addressed in addition to the provision of technology enablers—enterprise portals demand a fundamental change in the way stakeholders conduct business. Not to say that this has to be an overly painful exercise—in fact one of the advantages of deploying enterprise portals lies in the improved and simplified user experience they generate—but simply that training, focus group survey, and stakeholder input must be sought throughout the portal deployment to ensure that the various audiences “get what they want.”

Cultural and process issues aside, there are still fundamental elements that organizations should expect in a portal offering. These include:

• Sound Security Model—Above all, true enterprise portals—those that include internal and external audiences, information sharing, and extended enterprise functionality (e.g., customer facing portals and B2B portals)—must ensure the integrity of enterprise content. Organizations should demand that portal offerings deliver the benefit of single sign-on (access t