Enabling Knowledge Management in Today's Knowledge Economy

The most daunting challenge facing business management is delivering information to the virtual organization worldwide—information anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Technologies of the web are the foundation of today's intranets, and over the past six years business, government, and education have discovered the power of Internet and web technologies as a new computing paradigm for information sharing and collaborative computing. The enterprise information portal represents the next significant evolution in the advancement of organizational Intranets and graphical user environments (GUEs). This excerpt from a white paper entitled "Enterprise Information Portals: Enabling Knowledge Management in Today's Knowledge Economy" provides a concise overview of these elements and provides a high-level discussion around knowledge management in the e-economy.

What is Organizational Knowledge?

There are three types of knowledge within any organization: individual, group and enterprise, and that knowledge can be generally classified along the lines of being explicit, embedded and tacit.

• Explicit Knowledge—knowledge represented in documents, books, email and databases.;

• Embedded Knowledge—organizational knowledge found in business processes, products and services.;

• Tacit Knowledge—undocumented knowledge that is captured during business processes by knowledge workers.;

The overall challenge that many organizations face today is identifying where that knowledge resides and how to leverage it across the enterprise, group and/or individual. The majority of KM initiatives today usually revolve around identifying/discovering, classifying and indexing explicit knowledge in information systems, such as an enterprise document management system, and/or business content management system. In many cases KM systems also include access to structured information found in databases.

What is Knowledge Management?

As an organizational initiative, knowledge management is usually manifested in the form of a business system that is enabled by an array of technologies. Today the convergence of knowledge management and business intelligence is underway in many organizations and KM enabling technologies are a vital part of any customer's relationship management system. From an organizational perspective CRM, intellectual capital management (ICM), communities of interest or best practices (BPM), and competitive intelligence all fall under the umbrella of knowledge management.

One of the greatest difficulties in defining KM is the level of complexity inherent in many of the definitions themselves, and in their scope. This is perhaps the most difficult and confusing aspect of understanding what KM is and how it can be implemented from an organizational and/or business unit perspective. Below are descriptions of what can be considered the five technology blocks of enterprise knowledge management:

1. The Enterprise Information Portal —The EIP, or corporate portal can be the focal point of an organization's KM initiatives and can facilitate a comprehensive range of functionality, including single point of access to relevant structured and unstructured information, community of interest building, and collaboration.

2. Information Management Systems —A system in place which facilitates the organization, indexing, classification of documents, content, and digital assets such as video and audio files, illustrations, records, policies and procedures etc.

3. Federated Search —The ability to search across all organizational structured (databases) and unstructured (documents, records, emails, video & audio files, etc.) information sources. This is a seminal enabling technology that facilitates discovery of intranet and Internet information and data sources.

4. Business Intelligence —Formerly known as decision support, many BI systems were designed for specific business objectives such as data warehousing financial information for routine data analysis, standard report writing, adhoc querying, OLAP and data mining. Many BI systems are now being deployed to deliver on the promise of CRM initiatives, which are significantly more complex than data warehousing of financial data.

5. Collaboration —Electronic mail is still the most collaborative technology in most enterprises, however, a new class of collaborative technologies is emerging that can greatly facilitate workplace collaboration and the creation of communities of interest/best practices. These technologies enable virtual workspaces and workrooms that allow members to share documents, emails, schedules and collaborative document creation, in effect enabling collaborative eCommerce. The Knowledge Portal

Enterprise information portals are bringing together the worlds of knowledge management and business intelligence into a new desktop environment—the knowledge portal. In the millennium the knowledge portal will play a key role in empowering the virtual enterprise and the virtual employee by providing a personalized single point of easy access to relevant information—enabling better, faster decision-making. Knowledge portals or EIPs are also beginning to help organizations capture and leverage their intellectual assets by facilitating assembly of communities of interest, best practice and expert systems within a single intuitive user interface. The EIP should be viewed as an evolving technology platform, and in the future EIPs will incorporate streaming video and audio to include e-learning and e-training components, thereby potentially reducing overall organizational training costs.

Organizational And Cultural Aspects of Implementing KM

Although KM has become a strategic initiative in many organizations, it presents many significant organizational challenges to all levels of management including line of business managers and IT professionals. The confusing nature of the KM market is in part due to the broadness and complexity of the enabling technologies, and how it is defined and implemented in different organizations. KM's limited success in the past has been primarily the result of organizations taking a technology-only approach to KM initiatives, rather than addressing the salient cultural and organizational issues.

Leading-edge organizations have created a whole new class of business managers called knowledge managers, knowledge environment engineers, best practices managers, and/or information architects, to name a few. KM usually starts at the top and typically its most difficult challenge is establishing a culture of simply getting people to work together and share information. By facilitating information access, as well as sharing and collaboration, an organization, business unit and/or department can create best practices that ultimately lead to innovation of the business process. Increasing productivity and innovation are the seminal goals of any KM system, which can ultimately lead to increased competitiveness and success in your vertical market segment. If your organization has a non-information sharing culture and senior management is not behind KM then it is likely to fail. Building communities of interest and/or promoting best practices within an organization is more easily said than done, and the major barriers to successful implementation are primarily cultural, not information technology driven.

Successful KM initiatives are usually focused on strategic business initiatives and many organizations implement KM systems when they realize that the absence and/or loss of intellectual assets could negatively impact bu