Knowledge management tools

Citation

(2003), "Knowledge management tools", Work Study, Vol. 52 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ws.2003.07952aaf.004

Knowledge management tools

Knowledge management tools

Autonomy Corporation, a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise, has released Collaboration and Enterprise Networks (CEN) which makes it possible for organisations of any size and complexity to capture, visualise and manage employee expertise and make knowledge available throughout the enterprise regardless of location. Companies can maintain a competitive edge by giving employees the ability to collaborate on projects, as well as share information and develop best practices.

(Autonomy's technology powers applications dependent upon unstructured information including e-commerce, customer relationship management, knowledge management, enterprise information portals, enterprise resource planning and online publishing.)

Commenting on identifying expertise and driving collaboration, Daniel Rasmus, vice-president at Giga Information Group said the Autonomy suite of products is being used to bring a new level of personalisation to the employee. "Autonomy builds dynamic profiles of staff member interactions with information sources and maintains them over time, reflecting a historical context, but one that is also weighted toward more recent information."

Previously, organisations had to deploy legacy collaboration systems that relied on employees filling out forms or using a list of pre-defined keywords to describe their areas of interest. These approaches fail for a variety of reasons. The legacy systems generate additional work for employees by requiring them to fill out forms and update them. The systems fail to capture the employees' areas of expertise because employees either misrepresent their areas of expertise or do not continually update their profile as their projects and interests change. In addition, by relying on keywords, the collaboration tools do not match up experts because they may have selected different words to describe themselves or they could not find the most relevant tag for their profile.

Autonomy's software eliminates the manual efforts by automatically generating profiles implicitly and explicitly. As users interact with content, the system understands the concepts within the content and automatically develops a profile or adjusts it as the users' work projects change. In addition, because Autonomy understands, conceptually, user profiles and content, it will link together employees that are working on similar projects even though it may not sound like they are doing related work. For example, at a pharmaceutical company an employee researching medicines for depression will be linked to an employee in another R&D department who is working on medicines to treat eating disorders, because both are working with similar drugs.

CEN allows enterprises to get an overview of what information they have, who is working on or using that information, and who the experts are on particular topics within the organisation. With this knowledge, organisations can plug holes in their knowledge base or determine where duplication of work may be occurring. CEN's ability to profile network traffic through "mapping and visualisation" (colour-coded views of where information is located and how much is there) delivers enterprises a clear picture of their activities on a daily basis.

"In addition to the number of experts across diverse fields within BAE SYSTEMS, we have an incredible amount of information available to our employees, so it became increasingly apparent that we needed an efficient way to manage this knowledge," said Richard West, head of organisational and e-learning at BAE SYSTEMS. "Autonomy's technology give us real insight into what we know as a company and the ability to leverage that knowledge across the enterprise."

"Autonomy continues to develop and leverage its core IDOL technology for use in unique and efficient solutions for managing unstructured information," said Mike Lynch, CEO and cofounder of Autonomy. "CEN gives organisations incredible insight into what they know and the ability to leverage existing expertise to ultimately create competitive advantage in the marketplace."

For more information, see http://www.autonomy.com