Beyond knowledge
- Article 64 of 77
- Information Age, November 2003
Organisations no longer want enterprise-wide knowledge management systems. They want 'smart enterprise suites'.
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Over 2003, content management software vendor Documentum bought web collaboration specialist eRooms (and then more recently was itself acquired by storage systems giant EMC); Vignette, also from content management, acquired collaborative content software vendor Intraspect; and Open Text took over web content management and portal company Gauss Interprise, portal company Corechange, and document management and sharing software company Ixos.
Many companies are also trying to refine their product's search and categorisation technologies to match the kind of capabilities displayed by Internet search engine such as Google. But they have some barriers to scale. “Google has the advantage of being able to pick from three billion documents,” says Alkis Papadolpoullos, director of linguistics at Convera, a search and KM company. “It's likely to produce something relevant for you, provided you haven't searched for something too generic. But you still can't tell if what Google has produced is the best result for you. On a corporate network, you have far fewer documents to pick from and it's more obvious to you if the result isn't what you want. You need to be able to give the system a sense of what documents are about through taxonomies to produce good results on an internal network.”
Taxonomies, both enterprise-specific and personalised, will be one of the key ideas for KM systems in the next few years, says Edward Truch, director of The Knowledge Management Institute. And depending on its application, enterprises will either want vendors to develop specific categories or they will want to do it themselves.
While the KM label may have lost its lustre, subsumed into what Gartner analysts call 'smart enterprise suites' or broken down into components applicable to organisations' different needs, the underlying requirements for the technology are still growing. KM isn't dead; it has just been subsumed into something bigger.
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