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“Knowledge Management” is one of those terms that’s used often, seems to mean different things depending on who’s using it, that everybody knows they need but few know how to deliver. Even worse, most knowledge management solutions are cobbled together with disparate solutions that resemble a patchwork quilt sewed by Frankenstein’s blind cousin.

So how does someone, or an organisation, serious about things like:

• making it easier for their staff (in different departments, offices and possibly countries) to actually find all relevant knowledge resources or assets quickly and easily,
• putting internal and external information sources into one knowledge portal so searching can be across everything relevant
• managing automated archiving rules in a standardized way

actually get the job done elegantly, smoothly and effectively?

TO KNOCK IT ON THE HEAD THE SOLUTION MUST:

1.      Provide an intuitive UX (user experience).

2.      Utilize a top of the line federated search engine – preferably one whose algorithm can be tweaked to produce results that are based on your organisation’s taxonomy (company classifications and industry jargon), and your own user ratings.

3.      Pull-in and make searchable in the one tool, relevant external resources: these could include subscriptions to industry analyst or research reports, trade periodicals and blogs, RSS news feeds, information services and even social media monitoring.

4.      Pull-in and make searchable in the one tool, internal files from disparate repositories, servers, and portals while being agnostic to the hardware or software platforms used.

5.      Enable and promote user ratings, comments, and communication while looking at a knowledge asset or file.

6.      Facilitate access to key work process resources (calendars, workflow enablers, expert communities etc.)

Most people hoped Microsoft’s SharePoint would do the trick, and it goes a long way toward the goal – hence its massive worldwide proliferation – but most users will tell you...that out of the box it falls a bit short where knowledge management is the goal.

What are your thoughts on this subject?

Here’s hoping you find what you’re after,

Ronnie

ECM expert

http://www.linkedin.com/in/rpool2010

I work for Knowledge Systems (Nunwood) Ltd. makers of Fizz - an enterprise content management platform. For more information on Fizz please click here.