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Today's $12 billion knowledge management market provides comprehensive solutions to large organizations -implementing such solutions requires significant resources and depends on behavioral changes by employees. As a result, KM efforts often fall short of their goals.
This paper describes a new user-centric approach to managing structured and unstructured organizational documents and data. Focusing on end-user features offers significant benefits to corporations, their employees, and their IT managers.
1.0 Problem Definition
The Problem of Capturing Data
In the current approach to KM and enterprise search, capturing the structured and unstructured data in an enterprise or government agency is a complicated and difficult task since information resides in a variety of:
- Formats - documents, messages, relational data, Internet and intranet content, and multimedia
- Systems - ERP, financial, human resources, customer relationship management, and content management
- Locations - enterprise data and file servers, departmental network/shared drives, and employee desktops and laptops
Each business function or information system has its own requirements for accessing and manipulating data. Additionally, each has widely different user interfaces and storage systems with varying degrees of access by the rest of the enterprise. As a result, an enterprise or agency-wide KM solution contends with such a disparate collection of silos and stovepipes that the eventual system makes too many compromises to be of much use to anyone.
The Problem of Interfacing with Data
Currently, KM and search vendors typically work with an IT department on a hugely complex, expensive and labor-intensive effort to build a system capable of the full range of enterprise data management tasks.
Current KM solutions often fail in the following ways:
1. Inability to find and act on data hampering an agency's ability to identify, analyze or respond to dangers, opportunities or constituent needs, especially in times of crisis
2. Lack of mobile solutions, preventing data access by employees in the field
3. Extensive and complex user behavior and business requirements, leaving KM systems only partially utilized
4. Lack of extensibility and flexibility, failing to accommodate legacy, existing and future data sources
5. Poor search of local files or email, often obscuring the most relevant data
6. Lack of scalability, making the addition of data sources and systems challenging for IT
7. Need for management, training, and deployment, resulting in high ongoing cost of KM system
Although most enterprise and government organizations are now pursuing knowledge management, KM technologies have not yet realized significant impact on organizational productivity. Several factors cause this failure, including the methods of data capture and management, as well as interface and utilization.
2.0 A New Approach: Search-Based User Interface
A new approach to the information retrieval component of knowledge management assumes that companies already have legacy data and file storage and management systems. Instead of replacing those systems, a user-centric approach seeks to make existing data more immediately searchable, actionable, useful, and ultimately valuable by adding search-based user interfaces. Understanding the significant investments already made in KM systems, new search companies seek to give options to organizations by making existing systems work the way they want them to work, not the other way around.
In the presence of existing, largely taxonomy-centered systems, the new user-centric search interfaces are silo and stovepipe "agnostic." They provide connectors into existing sources of structured and unstructured data. Software development kits (SDKs) provide for customization to federate results from all available data sources.
Competing vendors who provide this user-centric approach will differentiate themselves in terms of how multiple data sources and types can be located and leveraged. Increased accessibility and usefulness of data, as well as enhanced interface, will increase the ROI of these vendors' solutions.
Search Technology: Information Processing in a Real-Time Environment
The traditional way of finding data is for the user to launch one application at a time, enter keywords and/or other search parameters, and hit enter. Frequently, retrieving all the information needed by a user requires repeating the process within multiple systems, such as document management, customer service, logistics, and email.
The new user-centric approach starts with the entire data set and then excludes non-matching items from it. The user easily pares away the non-relevant data from the known collection via the new interface.
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