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Capture, Context, and Correlation

By Christian Buckley posted 01-15-2015 01:33

  

If you spend much time following news and community sites that focus on content and knowledge management topics like I do, you've probably noticed the increased talk about "next generation portals" that take advantage of the latest social tools and machine learning capabilities. We really are moving into a "golden age" of collaboration, in my view, with incredibly powerful capabilities that learn from our activities and provide very personal experiences. However, even these new platforms and technologies will fail if organizations do not focus their plans around 3 key strategies:

  • The capture of content
  • The application of context
  • The correlation of disparate artifacts

Aside from my exercise in alliteration, these 3 strategies are all-important to your efforts to ensure that your corporate knowledge is captured from the minds of your knowledge workers (many of whom will be retiring in the not-so-distant-future); appropriate metadata and other information architecture are applied to make that knowledge searchable and, more importantly, findable; and it is then assembled in a way that can be discovered, assembled, and applied in a way that allows you to innovate.

 

While working with a client in Perth, Australia last fall on go to market strategies for their software platform, we discussed at length some of the problems they see with customers almost every day -- chief among these problems, the issue of key knowledge walking out the door each year as their workforce ages. The company, Glyma, provided me with some interesting data on the subject, like the fact that of the 155 million people in the US workforce, over 79 million of them (around 51%) are baby boomers nearing retirement. Knowing this, our approach to capturing and retaining this knowledge has not changed much in the past 25 years, even with all of our technical advances. We have these experts create documentation explaining the key business processes they own.

 

I remember joining Pacific Bell (the telephone company) back in the mid-1990s and being handed a massive 3-ring binder which, I was told, contained all of our key business processes, policies, and procedures. While I occasionally opened that binder to figure out some policy (usually at the request of a manager to "look it up myself") it largely sat on my shelf and gathered dust. But how different is that binder from the electronic media we collect, archive, and then forget? And how easy is it to apply metadata, taxonomy, and other information architecture components to that content (all things which can change regularly as your business changes)? Furthermore, as new projects and business problems arise, are you able to utilize all of that stored wisdom in a way that allows you to reduce project delivery times, reduce project costs, and increase the scope and scale of innovation?

 

Back to the idea of next generation portals, and why I think we are embarking on a new golden age, consider the solutions we now have (or will soon have) across the 3 key strategies I outline above:

  • Capture.
    We have tools that not only scan your paper records, but read what is scanned and store both image and content (text) giving you multiple ways to consume that content. But we also live in an increasingly paperless world where almost everything we do online can be stored for later recall.

  • Context.
    Not only can our platforms read through and understand what is in our content, these latest tools can identify metadata and automate actions based on what they identify. So whether an artifact is scanned and saved, a picture is taken with a mobile phone, a document is uploaded, or a form is filled out in a browser -- all of these are captured and then given context through automated and manual tagging, through our social interactions, and based on the patterns of activity of you, your team, and others within the system. The more you interact with the artifacts, the more the system learns, and the more accurate the context applied.

  • Correlation.
    This one is the most difficult to automate, but is made possible through capture and context.  Correlation is not just about identifying similarities between artifacts, but in finding insights through the patterns. It’s the ultimate goal of any knowledge management or collaboration platform: learn from the past to innovate for the future.

The underlying technologies to make these 3 key strategies a part of your KM platform exist today, and are increasingly pre-packaged and available through a SaaS model.  These solutions offer a way to escape the constant drain of knowledge and expertise as people move on or retire. No matter what platform you use, review how you approach each of these strategies today. With a clear picture of your current system and its many gaps, you'll be better prepared to take advantage of these new technologies in the future.

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