The Collaborative Knowledge Management Market
The paradox of knowledge management is that technology can’t really manage knowledge, which by definition resides in people’s heads. At best, companies can build an environment that fosters and encourages the capture, sharing, and transfer of explicit, recorded information when it’s available, and identifies expertise when it’s not.
-AMR Research
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 work place 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.
The importance of physical proximity will greatly diminish. After all, if you can recruit or retain a key employee without physical boundaries, your resource talent pool grows exponentially. Who really cares if they live in Beijing, San Paulo, Hyderabad, San Jose, Manchester, or Tokyo? This is not feasible without a strong, collaborative knowledge management framework for the researcher. Ardenno can help.
Source: Gartner December 2006
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 has 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 been failures, due to their “structure” and seem to the user community as just another administrative layer to navigate, with minimal value. 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.