Market Growth
Collaborative Knowledge Management—that is, the sharing of intelligence across the enterprise and with partners—is rapidly taking hold in the business community. Leading companies are looking for better ways to foster positive working environments for their knowledge workers. Your ability to provide a constructive collaborative working environment is becoming a workplace requirement, as the workforce undergoes widespread change. Increasingly, these changes will enable people to “customize” their workplace, information sources, tools, learning options and community networks. As broadband and wireless networks continue to grow and proliferate, the workplace will reshape itself rapidly.
According to a September 2007 report by AMR Research, U.S. companies will spend $73B on knowledge management software in 2007, and spending will grow nearly 16% to an average of $1,224 per employee in 2008.
As a growing number of needs and initiatives are left unsupported by established enterprise applications, the demand for KM technologies has increased, leading to record-level activity in knowledge management; content management; navigation, search, and retrieval; and collaboration platforms.
“$73B is a big number that represents an even bigger opportunity for software vendors and service providers,” says Jim Murphy, research director at AMR Research. “Enterprises are looking for content management, search, portal, and collaboration technologies that will enable innovation and improve process efficiency, customer satisfaction, and market agility. This wide range of needs unmet by existing systems leaves ample room for software and service providers.”
The market is forcing companies to construct or implement overlaying knowledge management frameworks that leverage their existing information management system and infrastructure investments. Many companies have begun to address these macro-information-based issues with structured portal solutions and document management systems. Unfortunately, the business community just can not successfully fit into a solution whose focus is document management or an intranet environment that needs to support the entire organization. Electronic notebooks, although interesting to some, have generally not performed as expected, due to their “structure” and seem to add another administrative layer, with minimal value provided to the user. Today’s user, is not particularly fond of having more administrative work added to their already overburdened workload.
Today's user is looking for solutions that add value to their day and minimize administrative work.
The market for Ardenno-type Collaborative Knowledge Management solutions is poised for rapid market acceleration for a few key reasons:
The Need to Build Stronger New Product Pipelines
Traditionally, organizations have provided very structured technology solutions to their teams in order to create “affordable and supportable” work environments. Unfortunately, most of these “vanilla” solutions have had little positive impact on the results yielded by these teams. Yes, the teams are better managed and infrastructures can be quickly replicated, but businesses also need to be about obtaining results and building a new product pipeline.
Organizations are searching for solutions to improve their collaboration capabilities
The ability to enhance collaboration and information sharing is growing in importance for those involved in knowledge creation and knowledge management. This is driven by the globalization of teams and the need to get to market rapidly. Companies continue to look for ways to do more with less and more organizations have learned that duplication of efforts and poor approaches to sharing learning experiences is a large cost driver that can be positively effected by solutions such as Ardenno.
The need to restrain soaring storage infrastructure costs
With the ongoing explosion in digital content, storage managers are searching for better ways to determine which files must stay on expensive primary storage and which can be moved to lower-cost secondary platforms. Unfortunately for the user, these “conflicts in needs and wants” seems to mostly find the user on the losing side of the discussion. They also need a way to reduce unnecessary storage resources. A Collaborative Knowledge Management solution with advanced data classification capabilities makes it possible to categorize information based on its business value, as recommended by industry analysts. A Collaborative Knowledge Management solution also helps address the duplicate file problem by giving users assurance that secure copies of each file will be securely archived with easy access through classification and search functions.
The availability of off-the-shelf solutions
Until recently, the only solution for implementing a Collaborative Knowledge Management solution was to build it. This was an expensive proposition with considerable risk. The emergence of reliable, off-the-shelf collaborative solutions like Ardenno, makes Collaborative Knowledge Management a more viable, affordable and easy-to-deploy alternative, enabling storage and managers to intelligently automate how their enterprises collect, classify, and trigger movement for file-level archival data to facilitate knowledge worker collaboration, as well as regulatory compliance.