Global Enabled Supply Chain Series: Knowledge Management

Have you ever tried to explain to someone how you organize your personal and business information? Do you get strange looks when you finish describing your hybrid filing system for both your home and office?

No clear and efficient system for record keeping has ever really emerged despite mankind's ongoing attempt to keep and store valuable and usable information. And yes, modern technology has allowed us to advance beyond ink and parchment and, for some of us, even beyond filing cabinets and rolodexes, but sophisticated databases still require that information be stored away in precisely-defined fields and then used in a way that can be transformed into knowledge and intelligence.

Once stored, how do you find the data again? Most companies host a mammoth amount of unstructured databases of valuable information. This information can be dug out of employees' hard drives, Web servers and company intranets: Word documents, PowerPoint slides, spreadsheets, e-mail and much more. Analysts claim that as much as 80 percent of a company's most valuable data is stored on these various files.

Enter information sharing and analysis or, its more appropriate moniker, knowledge management (KM). In order to mine these various documents and files, companies are realizing that technology should help them share information across systems and provide analysis capabilities.

According to IDC, an IT research organization, knowledge management continues to gain momentum. They expect worldwide KM services spending will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 41 percent, from $2.3 billion in 2000 to $12.7 billion in 2005. This growth comes as organizations turn their focus away from technology issues toward issues involving people and processes.

In version 4.0 of The Global Enabled Supply Chain (see the insert in this issue) Knowledge Management appears in one of the Decision Support Circles after information sharing and analysis. In the iSource Supply Chain model the Decision Support Circles always surround the Functional Links of the map.

KM is Back

The major consulting firms touted knowledge management in the late 1990s. The marketing hype at the time - as is typically the case - preached that the software would be the end-all panacea for enterprise information management. However, the problem was that even with the first-generation KM enterprise software employees still had the labor-intensive and expensive task of carefully organizing and annotating information before it could be managed.

So, knowledge management fell out of favor.

And for some analysts, the most important realization to gain is that if software can gather and share information as well as provide tools for valid analysis, then the system actually supports a type of knowledge management. But this makes the market difficult to identify.

"Under any traditional, healthy application, KM capabilities will be wrapped into it, although they might be named differently, like 'business process management' or 'best practice templates,'" says Navi Radjou, senior analyst on Forrester Research's Business Apps Team. "That's why IT research firms are not as comfortable creating a matrix of the KM software market like we do the other software markets."

Of course, it didn't help that KM lost its shine in the market. But it's making a comeback that is built mainly on the strength of better solutions and organizations that have a clearer picture of their information sharing and analysis needs. The biggest improvement has been in the search engine technology of the enterprise KM software players. Today's search engines, more notably for their work on the Web, have become much more effective at finding bits of data where they may lay.