Enabling Search-driven Knowledge Management
Earlier, knowledge management was defined as the process of identifying, capturing, organizing, accessing, using and sharing the organization’s knowledge which, in turn, enables people to personally and collectively become more productive, collaborative and innovative. Enterprise search addresses all of these six areas. It helps capitalize on internal and external knowledge, increase the circulation and sharing of information across teams and organizational functions, and improve knowledge workers’ productivity. It enables timely gathering of relevant information from any source, deep analytics on large volumes of information, constant monitoring for topics of interest, alerting and notification based on targeted events and user-defined criteria, and extreme personalization.
Information discovery solutions powered by an enterprise search platform increase knowledge workers’ productivity by simplifying information access and reducing the amount of time they must spend searching for information—leading to the situation where they can spend their time in customer-facing or other tasks that deliver more tangible business results. Improving everyday knowledge worker productivity is a very critical thing in a number of industries—for example, it has been estimated that 30% of knowledge workers’ time at pharmaceutical companies is spent searching for information. An IDC study (IDC Update: The Hidden Costs of Information Work, April, 2006), in turn, found out that searching for and analyzing information both consume 24% of the typical information worker’s time, and each task costs the organization more than $14,000 per worker per year. So, even the most risk-averse company can benefit from an enterprise search platform that provides a federated information access solution that not only saves knowledge workers’ time but also improves IT efficiency through consolidation.
The ability to improve collaboration across various organizational functions by bringing people, ideas and information together in powerful, yet friendly, ways is typically an outright requirement in any innovation-based business. This convergence enables employees to make connections and gain new insights that will benefit projects and profits. In effect, this unlocks and allows the sharing of knowledge, removes associated dependencies, and avoids reinvention through fact and relationship mapping between data silos.
Information workers need more than a traditional search box. They want to leverage personalized search capabilities that help them effectively and securely access relevant data. They want actionable results, not just lists of links. They want to gain an insight, which helps them answer their questions. They want to get both the contextual results with extreme precision and the contextual navigation for further investigation of related information, where facts, relationships and answers contained inside documents can be effectively visualized in the information discovery interaction. Conventionally, the scope in the knowledge discovery or enterprise search interaction is the document, database record or Web page, but these are oftentimes too ambiguously large. In many real-life interactions, the scope must be a sentence, paragraph or, in general, any XML or structural element. Ultimately, this must be enabled by the underlying enterprise search platform.
Expertise Location and Management
Today’s virtualized and geographically distributed organizations have faced formidable difficulties at locating experts in given subject areas. This is typically both an expertise capture problem and an expertise profiling problem—the problem of not being able to access a knowledgebase or an organization’s information assets with specific queries and the problem of not knowing who the experts are, respectively. Both of these challenges act as serious impediments for efficient collaboration and true reuse of expertise and knowledge.
Expert and expertise capture and location provide high-value functions when they are correctly implemented on the enterprise search platform. In this context, enterprise search and information access and discovery solutions provide a number of interesting opportunities:
1. Enterprise search helps capture explicit knowledge contributed directly into the peer group. Many organizations use email as a means for users to post requests for information on a certain topic in the hope their colleagues will respond. The goal is to enable more efficient knowledge and information sharing within a wider group. In this context, enterprise search acts as the focal point for the information needs of all users.
2. Enterprise search can help capture implicit and explicit expertise derived from monitoring the use of the search application, with which users interact. At the same time, they implicitly convey their areas of interest and expertise. The enterprise search system can track searches, viewed results and stored searches.
3. Enterprise search helps capture implicit expertise that is stored within produced content and completed tasks and business processes. The enterprise search system can also help draw associations between people and the context.
Many organizations have come to realize that sometimes finding the right piece of information is not as good as finding the right expert. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect expertise location and management to be one of the next potential Enterprise 2.0 killer applications inside the enterprise.
The Bottom Line
Information discovery and knowledge management fits into an exciting new trend called Enterprise 2.0, which suggests that allowing social networking in the enterprise can help new patterns of work and information sharing emerge and can give organizations the edge they need. The enterprise search and information access and discovery solution is increasingly the foundation for an organization’s move towards Enterprise 2.0. This also positions enterprise search as one of the critical components in the back-end infrastructure for organizations with large knowledge-based workforces. It helps organizations better understand their oftentimes complex internal and external environments by constantly monitoring their topics of interest and gathering relevant, timely information from any data source, enabling them to reap the real benefits of knowledge management.