September 2002
Information access gets a boost
by Cathleen Moore
and Carolyn A.
April
EFFORTS TO strengthen knowledge management and
information sharing have accelerated since Sept. 11, according to Gary Bird,
corporate vice president of the digitization group at Honeywell, a large
aerospace and transportation materials company in Morris Township,
N.J.
Prior to Sept. 11, Honeywell began piloting KM (knowledge
management) tools from AskMe with the goal of leveraging networks to connect
people across geographic and departmental boundaries. Honeywell's approximately
115,000 employees are spread around the world in nearly 100
countries.
"The major impact of 9/11 has been to accelerate that notion
that we need to connect our people much better so they can [more effectively]
meet, team, and share through networks versus getting on planes and traveling,"
Bird explains.
Furthermore, Sept. 11 was an eye-opener of how quickly
business conditions can change, illustrating that enterprises need to be able to
adapt quickly, he adds.
"It further reinforced the need to build agility
into your organizational design and into your culture," Bird says. "You need a
culture that can shift very quickly and adjust dynamically to changes in the
business environment that can happen very dramatically and
fast."
Honeywell is moving forward with its AskMe deployment in hope of
attaining that flexibility of culture and fostering simpler and easier
connectivity between workers and departments. Sept. 11 "was a resounding
statement that said, 'Yes, your business can change in a matter of seconds.' In
one morning our whole aerospace business shifted dramatically," Bird
says.
Many factors are heightening awareness of the need to preserve
corporate knowledge and make it more accessible, says Rob Perry, senior analyst
at The Yankee Group in Boston.
"Companies are really looking at ... how
to collect knowledge, make it redundant, and preserve knowledge and data in the
event of a catastrophe," Perry explains.
There is also an increased push
against centralization, so workers don't have to all be in one location, Perry
says. "Portals and knowledge management and that type of technology are being
used to enable the remote offices more."
Software designed to enable
location-based, intelligent data integration and sharing is also garnering
attention. One company in this space, MapInfo, has worked with the New York City
Fire Department, as well as with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and
other public safety and emergency resource agencies.
MapInfo's software
presents data in map form, exploiting open standards to query myriad back-end databases
for information to distribute to other users, according to Brian Lantz, homeland
security
advisor at Troy, N.Y.-based MapInfo. For example, a police officer arriving
first on the scene of a crime can click on the map to quickly find emergency
personnel closest to the location, as well as pull data on the street address
and surrounding buildings to determine the best way to block off the surrounding
area.
"Historically, every agency has its own data, and there's very
little ability to do real-time sharing," Lantz says. "Our software aims to
provide the collaborative ability to share data in open
systems."
MapInfo's mapping engine is built on pure Java and sports
extensions to the major database
vendors such as Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, and Informix.
In the wake of
Sept. 11, Lantz says MapInfo has been used to do predictive-type analysis,
dynamically creating plans that show such things as the location of critical
infrastructure or the optimal places to set up triage in case of an
emergency.
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