December 2001

All the Right Stories

By Russ Edelman

The quest for knowledge is primarily facilitated by two complementary themes. The first theme relates to the cultural environment that fosters the collection and use of knowledge. The second theme revolves around the myriad of technology offerings that can serve as a vehicle to collect and deliver the knowledge. Document management (DM) systems have historically been the dominant repository for controlled documents. However, there has been little progress made to date for ad-hoc knowledge that flows through an organization. With this need becoming more visible, a collection of software vendors have taken action to provide tools that can fill this void.

This void is loosely coined as "knowledge sharing" solutions and a collection of vendors are becoming very serious about filling the gap. More specifically, a new niche of technologies is evolving that allows for ad-hoc questions to be asked by a large user population and answered by experts. These experts, through self-proclamation or through some other form of selection, serve as authority for responding to inquiring minds. In addition to serving as a vehicle for connecting people, these systems allow tacit knowledge to be captured and leveraged for other people to utilize.

One of the vendors that can be included in this category is AskMe Corporation. Their technology allows the establishment of a directory of experts as well as a category tree (or taxonomy) of expertise. Simply, this tree is a hierarchical structure of interesting areas (similar to what you might see on Yahoo categories). In the case of AskMe's technology, let's assume a user, Daysia, is in search of information on roller coasters and amusement parks. She may first go to the category and drill down through "Family Fun" and then, "Amusement parks". In each category a list of experts would be displayed, along with any questions and related answers. Daysia may find that her question was not specifically answered, so she may send it off to one of the experts, in this case, Justin, who is highly regarded for his knowledge of amusement parks and roller coasters. Justin will receive the question via email and then respond. All of this information is captured in the database for future reference. The timeliness and, if desired, rating of Justin's answers will also be captured. The latter point provides an excellent mechanism for tracking the metrics of who and what is getting asked. Another vendor, Tacit Knowledge Systems, has an alternative approach in which an "experts" database is maintained, complemented by an advanced crawling engine that categorizes information, in varied formats, including email, and makes the information available in a secured fashion.

These technologies are providing demonstrable returns on an organization's investment as they address the real need to shorten the time required to locate information. Furthermore, organizations are now able to see some level of metrics as information seeking and sharing can be tracked. If for example, knowledge workers are searching for information on average, for one hour a day, a reduction in searching by 25% will yield an additional 15 minutes a day for each person. If an organization has 1,000 knowledge workers with a fully burdened cost of $50.00 per hour, this equates to 3.25 million dollars per year in pure timesavings alone. This is a simple demonstration of the return that can be associated with such an investment. More sophisticated analysis, along with other factors, such as time saved on the experts, will yield an even higher return. Some of the primary functional components behind these technologies consist of the following components:

Experts database
Automated or manual definition of expertise categories
Search engine
Content Crawling and prioritization engine
Adherence to content security

Advanced reporting tools to determine how knowledge is found and how it is provided.

As is the trend with many of today's applications, these products are often developed as Web-only environments through the use of Java, LDAP (or alternative directory service) adherence, ASP, and underlying multi-tier application servers that are designed for scalability. Compliance with your organizational requirements should be taken into account when considering the technologies that are available.

One final point with regard to knowledge-sharing solutions is the integration implemented between these solutions and portals. Understandably, there is a natural synergy that exists between these technologies. A consolidated directory of experts, single-sign on capabilities, and unified searching are examples of portal and knowledge sharing solutions. There is also a need to integrate knowledge sharing solutions into DM systems as much of the information associated with the knowledge sharing system may be found in a DM system. This allows documents to be managed with proper version control, yet provide links into the knowledge sharing solution.

Russ Edelman is the President of Corridor Consulting, Inc. Corridor specializes in the implementation of strategic collaborative computing solutions by designing, deploying, and supporting systems for international organizations. Russ can be reached at russe@corridorconsulting.com or at +1-781-229-9933.