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Knowledge-Management Tools
Technology Analyst: Rob Edmonds
Phone: +44-(0)20-8686-5555
Fax: +44-(0)20-8760-0635 |
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About This Technology
Knowledge-management tools encompass the technologies and techniques of collaborative computing, content management, and resource discovery, as well as the soft issues of teamwork, cooperation, and group dynamics. Companies increasingly recognize knowledge management’s potential to unlock corporate information resources—both implicit and explicit—as they seek to improve business practices and processes, deliver innovative products and services, and gain competitive advantage:
- Large corporations need to coordinate 24-hour operations worldwide and to manage distributed knowledge throughout the enterprise.
- Ever-larger computerized data sets and knowledge bases present large organizations with opportunities to share a greater percentage of their knowledge and know-how, in real time, across extended physical distances.
As a result of these developments, executives are turning toward the often vast amounts of information that now sit underused in their corporate databases, such as marketing information, account details, stock information, and product-design files. Even more data are available in unstructured form—on servers and on workers’ PCs. Use of this information is improving within departments, but corporatewide, relatively little dissemination, cross-referencing, or merging of information are taking place. Internet technologies provide the necessary connectivity and interoperability for such sharing, offering a low-cost, standardized, future-proof, backward-compatible network infrastructure: a so-called intranet. However, adoption of an intranet as a corporate communications conduit is still not enough. Companies must develop, integrate, and optimize internal information sources to realize their growth potential, tap external knowledge sources—including joint-venture partners, strategic alliances, government and university sources—to improve or expand their capabilities, and provide all participants in the value chain with a framework for understanding, participating in, and improving the company’s operations and profit-growth potential.
Knowledge-management tools help companies enhance knowledge creation and encourage its proliferation throughout the enterprise. Philosophers suggest that knowledge is useless unless people share it: Knowledge-management tools enable the collection, coordination, and distribution of information and knowledge so that team members can collaborate effectively in pursuit of a common goal. Although some analysts dismiss the term knowledge management as hyperbole, the underpinning technologies that support corporate content, harnessed by intranet and extranet systems, are common in many organizations. Only through the creation of networks of knowledge—both within and between companies—can organizations remove barriers of distance and time between distributed groups, increase quality and productivity, and build competitiveness within the expanding global marketplace.
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