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Stuart Garfield
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
How-To Toolbox
Knowledge management moving to a trackable commodity
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Every company, high-tech or not, has institutional knowledge necessary to keep the organization humming. Such knowledge often resides in documents and files, but everyone knows the easiest way to find that information is to ask the long-serving, grizzled expert who spent years dealing with the issues first-hand.
Knowledge management software and services have been aiming to make that expert either unnecessary or, at least, a trackable resource that can be reliably called upon. Those two approaches about what to do with the human versus document approach to knowledge management is traditionally viewed as old-school versus new-school.
One New England company, Northern Light Group LLC, thinks that it’s not so much “old versus new,” as using new technology to find the quickest source for a specific item in a company’s vast wealth of corporate how-to knowledge.
“In large companies one of the key points is that knowledge resides with individuals and is not separate from them. Individuals are experts, individuals have experience,” said C. David Seuss, CEO of Cambridge-based Northern Light.
And some people do more research— or are immersed more in some topics — than others do. That is where Northern Light’s technology comes in. It’s a search engine for corporate knowledge that also identifies the person who has the most experience with the topic being searched. In that way, while it may return a result of 1,000 documents that contain pieces of the information you are looking for, you might not have to read through dozens of them to glean the facts you want — because the guy down the hall already has read hundreds of them.
That approach works best in larger enterprises, Seuss said, because in smaller companies it isn’t needed.
“There definitely is a tipping point,” he said. “It has to do with once you get into multidepartmental, multilocation enterprises. Up to that point, I suspect everyone knows who the experts are. At some point, that becomes impossible.”
On the other side of the equation are technology offerings that range from established electronic content-management products to new object-centric databases. The advantage of these products is that there is no point at which they become most valuable, said to Tom Shoemaker, vice president, solutions marketing, for Needham’s Parametric Technology Corp., which specializes in a version of knowledge management for product manufacturers—product life-cycle management.
Shoemaker contends that the main reason a company doesn’t have a knowledge-management system in place is because it talked itself out of one. “I would suggest that sometimes companies have sized themselves out of the market,” he said. “They may have said, ‘We are a small business and the amount of files we are creating doesn’t really lend itself to needing some sort of management system.’ “
According to Shoemaker, there is no reason not to have knowledge management in place, no matter your size, particularly in today’s highly regulated business environment. After all, you never know when some European regulator may insist on seeing your company’s policy for handling toxic materials — and counting on a single compliance officer to be able to put his hands on it is neither efficient nor legally responsible, he said.
Brian Hill, a senior analyst with Forrester Research Inc. of Cambridge, agrees that size shouldn’t matter when it comes to knowledge management. “Most organizations should have a system in place, not only to mitigate legal risk but also to achieve IT efficiencies,” Hill said. “But most importantly, to capture real business benefit.”
For Hill, if more information can be made available at a moment’s notice to an employee, the better chance there is that a truly informed decision can be made, or that even a serendipitous connection can be discovered. He said a lot of companies are cobbling together an information strategy based on older technologies, but a growing trend is to repurpose a technology not specifically designed for knowledge management— for example, Microsoft Corp.’s SharePoint collaboration product.
In a survey last fall, respondents were asked what software they use for records management, 17 percent of respondents said SharePoint, said Hill in a report.
“Many vendors have classified SharePoint as a lightweight collaboration offering,” Hill said. “But what is happening is that the adoption of SharePoint has been so widespread that many companies are using it as a default content-management solution.”
It is not all hearts and flowers for SharePoint as a knowledge-management system, however. Hill’s report says that not having a physical records management aspect bothers many users, and there are limits on how you can define a legal hold requirement for a document, for example.
Stepping into that market with a possible solution is computer giant Dell Inc., who is partnering with at least a dozen companies in its new DX Object Storage Platform, a combination of hardware and software designed to store and make accessible objects such as documents, plans, files and images. One of its partners is Boston’s Iron Mountain Inc., which is integrating its NearPoint e-mail archiving and text analytics system into the DX product.
“You are seeing in the market a general awareness that information is at risk,” said T.M. Ravi, chief marketing officer for Iron Mountain Digital. “Because of that, corporations are being proactive in trying to figure out what information they need to retain and for what period of time to address the needs of regulatory compliance and legal discovery.”
According to Dell, the DX platform solves many of SharePoint’s problem, while allowing quick access to documents. Like SharePoint, it is based on a flat-file database that uses very rich metadata files to describe the file in detail for rapid searching and retrieval.
The object itself doesn’t have to be in the same database as the DX platform, as long as it is connected. From DX’s standpoint, there is no difference between having a document in the database, and having a rich metadata file with the path to the document on another server.
Whatever technology a company chooses to organize its operational information may have to change in short order, according to Northern Light’s Seuss.
“It’s a pretty exciting time,” he said. “I think that the idea of a knowledge-management system might be passé. The idea is much larger than just knowledge management.”
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