The Next Evolution of Knowledge Management

The information explosion has created a quandary in which technological innovations increase the quantity and connectivity of information without addressing one important fact—the human capacity to process information has remained the same. Instead of leveraging the ability to access more information, organizations have suffered from added costs and inefficiencies with a focus on activity instead of results. Productivity has dropped and quality has decreased.

However, with the right tool, it is possible to experience instant access to reliable, valid information. The ideal solution would eliminate the need to manually search, categorize, or index information in order to transform it into usable knowledge, automatically delivering information to you based on your unique perspective.Such a solution is knowledge enablement—the progression beyond simple knowledge management and the manual organization and indexing of files into carefully designed schemes. A knowledge enablement tool understands the meaning, content and context of information and proactively delivers desired information to the appropriate parties. Knowledge enablement not only overcomes knowledge management breakdowns that occur from the misclassification of information, it enables reclassification of documents—including the unstructured content that makes up 80% of the information managed by the typical enterprise. As your organization’s knowledge and experience increases, so does your ability to acquire the information you need.

The days of keyword- and Boolean-based search and retrieval that return thousands of results should be well behind us. Organizations cannot afford dips in productivity that result from employees spending countless hours manually indexing and categorizing information before they can make sense of it. What businesses need today is a knowledge enablement tool that automatically accesses and organizes the intellectual capital contained across multiple repositories—email, fax, electronic documents—dramatically increasing your speed to knowledge.

The perfect knowledge enablement tool is also one that empowers everyone—from the individual knowledge worker who strives to be more productive to enterprise colleagues collaborating on projects, from entire organizations promoting their products to research teams across governmental agencies working together to safeguard the nation. Because the need for specific knowledge is pervasive—encompassing not just segments of the work force but every single individual in some capacity—the right solution is one with the flexibility to:

• provide direct access to all your individual information repositories (including local hard-drive and network-based file systems) and formats (including Microsoft office documents, email, scanned document images);;

• provide a centralized repository for group, departmental, site, and enterprise-wide sharing and dissemination of knowledge created from both internal and external data sources; and;

• enable external users and customers to access public information (e.g., e-tailers allowing customers and prospects to easily search their sites for products and information).;

The perfect solution speeds time to knowledge so that your information assets are just that— assets to your business rather than obstacles to your mission-critical goals.

Choosing a Knowledge Enablement Tool

The right knowledge enablement tool should extend beyond the capabilities of traditional software technologies, search engines, keywords, or rules-based engines and have the ability to learn by example. Such a capability would then allow you to show the knowledge enablement tool examples of information that meet specific criteria or context, and have the tool deliver or act on the information it finds—regardless of form or structure. Whether the information you need resides in paper or electronic documents, faxes, email messages, desktop documents or on the web, your knowledge enablement tool should be able to find and transform it into specific knowledge that you can use to do your job.

As the knowledge enablement solution learns what your key interests are, it should have the capacity to establish dynamic, virtual organization schemas that are independent of the physical structure of the original files. Then, it could cluster related knowledge around concepts and topics relevant to you, providing a powerful representation of your perspective—your view of the world as it relates to areas of research and expertise. In addition, it should allow you to compare existing knowledge repository content to your view.

Such a solution should also allow you to share and/or publish your view across organizational and geographic boundaries to facilitate the collaboration, communication, and propagation of your expertise. By doing so, organizational productivity increases, access to best practices is provided, cross-organizational expertise is shared, and lessons are learned from previous projects and industry research.

For example, suppose a government agency is responsible for just one aspect of homeland security—monitoring and preventing bio-terrorism, an enormous task given the increasing threat of such activity. In this case, the knowledge enablement solution could be taught which symptoms or diagnoses are of interest to the agency, and then continuously crawl the sites of hospitals, state agencies, and other medical entities to look for the information. Once the information is found, it can be routed to the appropriate party. Instead of reacting to information found after endless hours of searching by staff members—when it may be too late to prevent any damage—the agency could be proactive, gaining information in a timely manner and taking action to thwart terrorist activity.

Pattern Matching for Accurate Results

Pattern matching is a critical component of any knowledge enablement solution. The ability to understand the patterns and meaning in structured and unstructured information and to access and process all types of information based on content and context—not keywords, phrases, or format—can mean the difference between a successful search and one that is fruitless. Human error cannot be controlled when users are typing in queries and data sources themselves frequently contain errors. But you still have a need to find information, and a solution that incorporates pattern matching will make sure you do find it, regardless of errors. Just like human beings, the more information a knowledge enablement tool is given, the easier it is for it to find the desired information. Providing an entire paragraph—or a concept—rather than simply a word or two as search criteria provides the leverage to produce the results you desire.

Pattern matching can also help in refining searches. You can highlight specific sentences, words, or even entire paragraphs of documents returned from a search, and the knowledge enablement tool will use pattern-matching algorithms to find other documents that contain similar information. Therefore, you can continually refine your search without taking the time and energy to sift through thousands of irrelevant documents.

A Single Knowledge Base for Quick and Easy Access

Another must for a comprehensive knowledge enablement solution is a data acquisition component with the ability to employ multiple crawl agents for gathering and storing information from multiple locations into a single knowledge base. Such a feature would enable you to direct crawl agents to acquire data from virtually any number of