Capturing, Understanding and Leveraging Knowledge Capital in the Internet Age
The growing ubiquity and sophistication of the Internet, together with an increasingly mobile workforce, has made effective knowledge management a critical component of any business strategy. To successfully manage and leverage knowledge and expertise across global boundaries, corporations need to implement knowledge management strategies that enable them to capture, manipulate, and deploy the information residing in their environments. Analyst research confirms industry recognition of this requirement: IDC estimates that the knowledge management software market will grow from $1.4 billion in 1999 to $5.4 billion in 2004.
The Growth of Explicit and Emergence of Tacit Knowledge
The Internet has ignited an explosion of explicit knowledge within enterprises, comprised of structured and unstructured data. Structured data is information found in databases and legacy systems; unstructured data is information found in text documents, e-mails, HTML pages and the like. Historically, corporations have invested in systems that leverage structured data within their enterprise databases, but have not made similar investments in their unstructured information assets. Consequently, knowledge located on disparate repositories such as file servers, web servers and application databases has remained untapped and underutilized.
A similar growth in tacit knowledge is occurring with the Internet providing knowledge workers access to a broader range of information and ideas that fuel their creativity and intellectual development. Tacit knowledge is not easy to capture or express; it is composed of intuition, ideas, unanalyzed experiences, skills and habits. Although valuable to corporations, tacit knowledge is often lost when knowledge workers leave the enterprise.
To cope with the rising tide of information, the IT industry has begun to develop solutions that help capture, analyze and leverage explicit as well as tacit knowledge. Because there is no single, silver-bullet solution that encompasses every knowledge management requirement, corporations require a best-of-class approach that integrates multiple solutions and is scalable, extensible, and available 24x7x365.
Sun’s Knowledge Management Strategy
Sun’s knowledge management strategy combines best-of-breed solutions along with an infrastructure comprised of servers, an operating system, middleware (such as web servers, directory servers and application servers) and technologies such as Java and XML.
Since knowledge flows from many sources both within and outside a company, an open system architecture is imperative for building an effective knowledge management infrastructure. An open system architecture is essential for two reasons:
Extensibility. Open platforms provide the widest selection of knowledge management solutions and the most seamless integration paths.
Scalability. Open platforms have become the environments of choice for Internets, intranets, and extranets because they are highly available and can scale horizontally and vertically to meet enterprise needs.
Financial Services: A Case Study
Leading organizations around the globe use Open Text and Sun solutions to help solve key business challenges. For example, a large European financial service organization runs Open Text’s Livelink on the Sun platform to help enhance its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution.
To optimize its asset management and investment consultancy services, the organization wanted a software solution to support financial processes from a customer-centric perspective. The combination of the Solaris platform and Livelink resulted in a faster information retrieval process, enabling the bank’s financial consultants to more efficiently define the best investment strategy for individual investors. In addition, the compatibility of the Solaris platform and Livelink enabled this organization to implement its CRM solution in only 12 weeks.
Sun hardware is built from the ground up around open standards. It is also known for its extensibility and scalability as well as high reliability and performance. Sun’s Solaris 8 operating environment forms the core of this infrastructure. Solaris 8 offers clustering and kernel-based multi-threading for scalability, and features such as dynamic re-configuration, hot patching and alternate pathing for availability.
Layered on top of that, Sun provides an array of industry-leading middleware applications through its iPlanet offerings. These include the industry leading iPlanet Directory Server, the iPlanet Web Server, and for easy development, deployment and management of large-scale knowledge management applications, the iPlanet Application Server.
Sun is also pioneering efforts in key technologies such as Java and XML that represent the backbone of knowledge management applications. Java technology provides a unified, open technology platform that scales from embedded device to desktop, set top and enterprise server. Scalability and productivity is critical for knowledge man-agement applications which, like most enter-prisewide systems, must be built quickly and be deployable over a wide range of target platforms. The Java technology frameworks for enterprises include the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE ), Micro Edition (J2ME), Enterprise JavaBeans architecture and JavaServer Pages framework.
XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a standardized, platform-neutral method for representing data that is transmitted between computers. The power of XML lies in its ability to separate content from format, thereby allowing content to be easily reused and republished to different media. Using XML, companies can more easily ensure the flow of information, making it easier for them to engage in collaboration and information exchanges. The whole XML effort was started by Jon Bosak of Sun Microsystems. Currently, Sun is integrating XML technologies into its core Java platform and developing technology to make it easier for developers to write web services components by marrying Java technology and XML.
Sun has established close relationships with leading knowledge management software vendors such as Autonomy, Documentum, Knowledge Management Software, Open Text and Smartlogik. Sun also offers the iPlanet Portal Server and its associated products as a complete solution for managing knowledge assets.
Directory Publishing: A Case Study
Yell.com’s mission is to place the world’s Yellow Pages online to enable anyone, anywhere to search the Yellow Pages to find what they need quickly and effectively. Yell.com needed a search engine and server platform powerful enough to manage the massive traffic and data volumes generated, including the ability to:
- Cope with 100 million page impressions per month.;
- Manage peaks of up to 100 simultaneous searches per second and a base load of 50 searches per second with no appreciable loss in the quality and speed of the service.;
Yell.com tested search engines and servers from top worldwide vendors using a main query index consisting of two million records. Results had to be ranked by the number of paid advertising features. Yell.com selected Smartlogik on Sun because this combination delivered consistently fast response times handling up to 20 queries per second within 550 milliseconds. Most importantly, the tests validated that Smartlogic scales on Sun while maintaining high performance levels.
Knowledge Management Framework
To help enterprises explore knowledge management, the Sun Educational Services group (SES) developed the knowledge management framework. This framework reinforces the concept that successful knowledge management initiatives must address specific business issues and answer the basic question, “Who needs to know what and how will they acquire it?” The knowledge management framework contains four elements: business drivers behind the need ("why"), content ("what"), people ("who"), and the approach ("how").
“Why?” Knowledge management can be very expensive and time consuming; therefore, these solutions have to align with an organization’s overall goals and objectives.
“What?” Content needs to be identified, captured and categorized for easy reuse and adaptation.
“Who?” Knowledge management must identify and develop expertise within the organization.
“How?” Technology has been an innovating force in emerging approaches to knowledge management: “repositories,” “communities of practice,” and “continuous learning.”
Repositories focus on creating a library of explicit, well-documented knowledge using document/content management tools to index, track revisions and channel workflow.
Communities of practice emphasize connecting rather than collecting, dialogue not just monologue, and tapping into dynamic, tacit knowledge rather than static, explicit knowledge.
Continuous learning enables individuals to acquire knowledge. Learning Manag-ement Systems enable continuous learning by providing assessments, training, eLearning and expert interactions.
Putting the knowledge management framework to work in its own organization, SES conducted an extensive, internal “knowledge audit” to see how information flowed within the worldwide organization.
Surveys were conducted and three major recommendations were made: 1) improve communications training, 2) target website content to worldwide audiences, and 3) ensure "vision" is understood and applied worldwide. A year after making improvements, the survey was re-conducted. Results: a 25% improvement over the prior year’s survey results
Internally At Sun
Sun regularly coordinates meetings between Sun and customer executives, providing invaluable customer insight. These meetings require extensive coordination in planning, preparing and disseminating information across geographies and divisions.
To address these needs, Sun implemented communities of practice using software from Intraspect. Members in these communities rely on shared documents, threaded discussions, expert directories and information links to collaborate and develop meeting content across diverse geographical and divisional groups. Sun also developed a multimedia tool to disseminate webcasts of customer interviews and written transcripts on a secure website to allow users to see and hear customers express their thoughts and sentiments.
Since implementing these communities and multimedia tools, Sun has significantly reduced e-mail traffic and the number of e-mailed documents, freeing up valuable e-mail server space. More importantly, Sun is now able to convey information in a more effective, powerful manner to users, while shortening the learning curve for new members.
Knowledge Engineering
Sun is also focusing on knowledge engineering. Sun’s Global Knowledge Engineering group (GKE) provides scalable business frameworks and technical platforms for delivering reusable, timely knowledge worldwide. In alignment with Sun’s Product Life Cycle management process, GKE has developed the PKLC (Product Knowledge Life Cycle) program to establish common languages for managing the capture and maintenance of knowledge assets over the product lifecycle. This program consists of creating reusable models that integrate technology, processes and knowledge workers to ensure that customer needs are met. One such model, piloting at the end of this year, focuses on improving communication and collaboration between services and product engineering groups to deliver product feedback to the product groups as quickly as possible. (Keep an eye out for future articles on this initiative.)
Sun’s Sales Organization
Sun’s Global Sales Organization (GSO) wanted to shorten the learning curve of new salespeople so they could devote more time to generating sales. New salespeople were bombarded with information, spending 20% to 40% of their time looking for information such as prices, configurations, product information, etc. To speed time to information, GSO implemented the MySales Portal solution to allow the capture, identification, accessibility, distribution and categorization of information efficiently and effectively. To help sales find the right information at the right place at the right time, the MySales Portal uses software from various vendors including:
- Documentum—document management;
- Interwoven—content management;
- Intraspect—communities of practice;
- Semio—taxonomy generation;
- iPlanet LDAP Directory Server—expert identification;
- iPlanet Application Server;
GSO measured its impact and discovered that in the first year alone, they saved $12 million in items such as paper savings and lower website administration costs. More importantly, GSO calculated that the investment payback translates into recapturing only 5% of the time spent on finding information: a system will pay for itself if a first year sales rep saves 20 to 40 minutes per week using the new system. Bottom line—substantial return on investment in a short period of time.
Leveraging Knowledge Capital Today
With the growth of the Internet and an increasingly mobile workforce, leveraging organizational knowledge is not an option—it is an imperative to succeed in today’s competitive landscape. Companies that have the foresight to manage their knowledge capital today with an open, scalable and extensible approach will have an advantage in the future, making it tougher for their competition to catch up.