The future of Knowledge Management

...is Business Intelligence (BI) + Enterprise Content Management (ECM) + Enterprise Search (SES)

When are knowledge managers going to realise that the Enterprise Data Warehouse, the Enterprise Intranet and the Enterprise documents and records are all components of the same service? What service? The delivery of Enterprise Knowledge and Information.

The concept of 'Search' made ubiquitous by Google has transformed the way we think about finding and accessing knowledge. The ease of the Google experience sets the expectations of users to how easy it is to search and consume knowledge and information without requiring any understanding of the disparate, disconnected systems that hold the information.

Yet, inside the enterprise - knowledge is fragmented across mutiple systems, rarely searchable, rarely versioned and categorised, not to mention maintained to the requirements of the Public Records Act (PRA). Vast, untapped data warehouses of business knowledge that managers are crying out for, but is only made available to small groups of users. Once again, rarely searchable, rarely versioned and catalogued. Intranets maintained as static copies of yesterdays information....is anyone seeing the connections here?

Why not serve your intranet (and extranet) form your ECM system? at the same time implement Enterprise Search over the top to make sure everyone can find all of the information that isn't yet in your ECM.

Let Search categorise and expose your valuable Data Warehouse (Business Intelligence) reports and information....anyone in the organisation searching for 'last months financials' can actually find out that a) the organisation has a data warehouse b) it contains a report called 'last months financial report' and c) that 'bob' wrote the report and here's his phone number and a link to the report....

Provide a single entry point to all enterprise information.....users can search 'everything' , from phone numbers to performance reports, news items to numbers, financials to flow charts. Difficult? No! The technologies already exist, the thinking is what's taking time to catchup up....