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IntraKNetsã : Intranet-based Knowledge Management Solutions: Supply |
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On the supply side, advances in several technology areas have made such solutions feasible both technically and financially. The most important advances have been made in the field of document management, database analysis, and automatic text manipulation and processing. Each one of these developments addresses one of the shortcomings of past KM systems and thus increases the chances of future success.
- Document Management Systems - In January 1998, fifty document management vendors and large customers agreed on a standard that allows users of corporate Intranets to view documents stored in any proprietary system. This standard, called Document Management Alliance’s 1.0 specification, will enable Intranet users to carry out searches across multiple systems likely to exist in any large organization. Analysts expect the DMA standard to mean more than 50% annual growth for document management vendors for a few years to come. More importantly, such standards will increase the success of enterprise-wide KM systems.
- Database Analysis - Advances have been made in database searching and analysis tools, data warehousing and mining. Rather than deploy the same client/server back end with a web-based front end, new products on the market, such as Cognos’ Impromptu Web Query , use intuitive designs that are both familiar and intuitive to Corporate Intranet users. These developments will grow the user base from a limited number of power users to the larger, less technology-savvy population of corporate employees.
- AutomaticText Manipulation and Processing — Advances in such technologies get around the problem of users’ unwillingness to interrupt their daily work to feed such systems with information. New solutions on the market automate the capture of knowledge and make it a byproduct of daily business functions. Hence, solutions such as Autonomy’s Knowledge Suite [R9] deploys a profiling system that automatically identifies an employee’s area of expertise and tells other users in the company interested in such area about it.
The following graph shows what applications will help achieve which goals, taking into consideration the difficulties of capturing tacit knowledge vs. capturing explicit knowledge:
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