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A sneak peek at KMWorld 2024 with M-Files and Atlas by ClearPeople

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Ahead of the KMWorld 2024 conference in Washington DC, Ville Somppi, senior vice president, industry solutions, M-Files, and Gabriel Karawani, co-founder, Atlas by ClearPeople, joined KMWorld’s special TechTalk: Top Trends to Catch at KMWorld 2024 webinar to explore innovative breakthroughs, success stories, practical advice, and real-world insights shaping the world of knowledge management.

“When we talk about knowledge management and knowledge at work, it comes from the people,” began Somppi. “Our job is to make sure it is easy for them to…leverage the knowledge they have, learn more, and share that knowledge…but people are where it all begins.” 

These people—knowledge workers and knowledge consumers alike—are currently dealing with the fact that knowledge work processes remain frustratingly manual. Focusing on these personas, M-Files helps knowledge workers work smarter by automating the classification and organization of information, workflows, security, and compliance.

The benefits of this transformation are tangible. M-Files’ platform enables customers to achieve an ROI of 294% with 75% more efficient workflows, 65% faster filing, and a 50% improvement in finding information—even without AI.

The role of AI, however, is certainly crucial in the space of KM. “Once you have…made life simpler for a knowledge worker [through automating knowledge capture] …that’s only the beginning,” Somppi noted. “Now you have tons of information captured in digital format that you are able to process with the help of AI.”

Somppi paints AI as a helpful colleague that allows workers to interface with the knowledge they have captured, asking relevant questions that prompt intelligent, contextually grounded responses.

“But it is not that simple in order to get this right,” cautioned Somppi. “The system—the infrastructure—needs to be set up correctly so the…artificial intelligence understands the context of the question.”

At the upcoming conference, Somppi hints at diving deeper into this topic, examining three core obstacles to overcome for KM: connectivity, confidentiality, and curation.

Keeping with the theme of people-centric KM, Karawani examined a “Groundhog Day” problem consistently faced by Atlas by ClearPeople customers: Finding quality information is hard, and getting expert answers is even harder. According to reports from McKinsey and Asana respectively, 9 hours per week are wasted searching for information while users are interfacing with an average of 10 apps 25 times a day.

Karawani boiled down this problem to a “nearly primal” phenomenon: People are lazy. Meaning, “the immediate solution is nearly always something like, tag stuff, organize stuff, remove redundant stuff…[and] that’s just too boring…[and] cumbersome.” 

This resistance from users—a fundamental flaw in information systems, according to Karawani—is what Atlas by ClearPeople aims to solve with automatic tagging.

Since tagging is still critical for cultivating a successful KM strategy, removing the burden of this process by automatically and frictionlessly classifying knowledge creates a sense of proactive search. Proactive search, Karawani explained, is shaped by content brought to users within the context of their work due to a preemptive understanding of what that information means.

“Frictionless automated tagging in context of where you do your work…dynamic, contextual search and search results…line of business-oriented, process-driven interfaces easily templated by subject matter experts, by knowledge managers, by project managers…is fundamental to how Atlas works,” Karawani noted.

These topics will be discussed and more at the KMWorld 2024 conference. To register, please go to https://www.kmworld.com/conference/2024/Register.aspx.

For the full, in-depth webinar with M-Files and Atlas by ClearPeople, you can view an archived version of the webinar here.

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