Making knowledge active daily
Getting the appropriate information from both internal and external sources without interrupting the work process would be pretty nice functionality for a knowledge worker.
Sounds pretty lofty though, doesn’t it? Lofty or not, it is the premise behind Autonomy’s (www.autonomy .com) new ActiveKnowledge technology.
The Delphi Group (www.delphigroup.com) analyst Carl Frappaolo put it in context when he said that too many companies make the mistake of seeing knowledge management systems as specialized applications instead of day-to-day tools.
"ActiveKnowledge technology positions knowledge management as an integral part of day-to-day business functions performed by employees - whether they are writing a new business presentation, a marketing report or an E-mail message," said Frappaolo. "By positioning ActiveKnowledge as an integral part of the business process, user resistance is limited and utilization should be significantly and positively impacted."
ActiveKnowledge analyzes the document, PowerPoint presentation or E-mail a worker is composing and recommends real-time links to relevant documents. Those reference documents can be news feeds, Web sites, Lotus Notes (www.lotus.com) files, E-mail messages or word processing files.
Active Knowledge will be part of Autonomy’s Knowledge Management Suite 2.0, which will be generally available this spring starting at $25,000.
The suite is comprised of a server designed to automate categorization and hyperlinking of information and profiles of employee expertise, as well as Knowledge Update, a portal-like tool that pushes relevant developments to employees.
In conjunction with the Live Alert module, Knowledge Update monitors specified internal and external sources, creates a personalized report with information relevant to the individual’s specific job and alerts the user as soon as the information appears.
Employee expertise profiling is done by analyzing the documents produced by employees as well as the research they do. Autonomy provides that functionality through a unified visual interface called the Visualizer Module.