It's Time for a Unified Information Strategy
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Scaling Knowledge Management: IT’S TIME FOR A UNIFIED INFORMATION STRATEGY Sponsored by Authored by Joe McKendrick, Lead Analyst Scaling Knowledge Management: It’s Time for a Unified Information Strategy Authored by Joe McKendrick, Lead Analyst To succeed in today’s diverse digital economy, Real-World Challenges with enterprises need to proactively and effectively create, store and deliver content. Doing so means Knowledge Management superior customer experience, enhanced employee While a knowledgebase may exist in a digital productivity, and stronger partnerships. A format, its reach and relevance may be severely knowledge-driven enterprise needs to provide impeded if it cannot be scaled to meet new managers, knowledge workers and line employees requirements or grow with the organization. all the information they need, at the moment they Today’s enterprises are adding and expanding need it, to respond to customer and market digital channels and processes, reaching new needs—to support product design, product global markets, and innovating at a blinding maintenance, information systems management, pace. A knowledge management solution and software creation. However, much of this needs to be able to expand and meet this information—in the form of documentation, accelerating pace. messaging, graphics, video files, audio files, and Ongoing surveys by KMWorld find that transactional data—is locked away in silos and embedding knowledge management into the within diverse applications across organizations, day-to-day work at enterprises is top of mind. The requiring inordinate amounts of time and treatment of KM as a standalone function resources to locate. continues to be the issue that concerns respondents While information from all these sources is the most, along with a related concern, siloed critical to business success, the chaos continues to information systems. Currently, half indicate they grow within enterprises. Technology continues to have encountered challenges to their grow more sophisticated, yet knowledge is still implementation plans and goals. Finding the right scattered and disconnected across organizations— skills also continues to be an issue holding KM not only in enterprise content management efforts back, with one-third indicating they simply systems, but also databases, records management can’t find the right skills. Satisfaction with strategic systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) performance around KM continues to grow as an systems, and customer relationship management issue as well—fewer than half, 49%, report they are (CRM) systems. These are likely all managed by either “highly” or “somewhat” satisfied with their different units and teams across the enterprise. A organizations’ implementations. traditional content management approach is Only 22% of knowledge management executives not enough. responding to the most recent Technology Services In this thought leadership paper, we will explore Industry Association study have achieved some new avenues available to enterprises for sharing level of maturity in their knowledge management information, and how to enable seamless access to efforts—defined as achieving ROI, optimizing and information to users across the enterprise. automating processes, or leveraging analytics. Only ADOBE 2 October 2020 8% report their knowledge management efforts key areas offered in today’s highly fragmented have attained strategic value to their organizations. market—many are bundled within solution sets, but Complicating this capability is the scattershot others are often addressed singularly by vendors in approach that characterizes knowledge management the space. There are nine broad categories of solutions efforts. Marketing departments maintain content that are brought together within knowledge management systems with sales content, engineering management environments, including advanced departments will maintain repositories for technical analytical tools, application development tools, documentation, IT maintains its own cache of content management systems, data management, documentation, and so on. Capabilities are spread input technologies, methodologies, service providers, across multiple solutions from multiple vendors across and user interfaces. the enterprise. To illustrate the wide diversity in this market, here are examples of the leading categories that make up Accidental Knowledge knowledge management as we know Management Architecture it today: The disadvantages today’s decentralized, • Advanced analytics: Artificial intelligence/ accidental knowledge management architectures machine learning, collaboration and project bring to enterprises include the following: management platforms, image-based analysis and classification, text analytics • High total cost of ownership from maintaining • Application management, development and separate systems and duplicate content delivery: APIs and software development toolkits, • Difficulty measuring ROI of content management cloud compute platforms, low-code/no-code capabilities development tools • Reduced productivity from time spent searching • Content management: Advanced search and for content discovery; curation tools, document management, e-discovery, e-signature, content automation, • Lack of awareness of available content content collaboration, content creation, content • Documentation content may not be accessible management platforms when and where needed • Data management: Databases/data lakes, • Content may be inconsistent across business data visualization tools, file analytics and units and departments sharing, metadata management/master data • Lack of collaboration between business units and management departments • Input technology: Barcode recognition, • Customer dissatisfaction at inability to rapidly document and data capture solutions, document resolve product or system issues imaging, scanning solutions, OCR • Methodologies/Best practices: Business process Current Landscape of Knowledge management, campaign management, case Management Solutions management, information governance, risk and compliance, records management There is no single, definable category of “knowledge management”; rather, it is based on a wide range of • Services: Consulting and systems integration disciplines and capabilities. The following are some • User interfaces/user access management: ADOBE 3 October 2020 Augmented reality/virtual reality, intranets, taxonomy, metadata, security and lifecycle mobile access, natural language processing/ management chatbots, self-service solutions • Structured and unstructured data formats: Knowledge management relies on both structured Gaps in Knowledge data such as relational database information, and unstructured data such as documents and video files. Management Solutions Knowledge management systems need to pull The wide array of technologies and capabilities information from systems supporting either format that are broadly applied to knowledge management points to the need for a more comprehensive Building a Robust, Scalable approach to the capture, organization, discovery Knowledge Management Solution and accessibility of knowledge assets. Currently, there is dysfunction in approaches to providing A scalable knowledge management architecture knowledge workers or technical staff the that delivers content and data from all sources, information they need as it is needed. and grows as the organization grows, requires a The gaps in today’s fragmented array of cohesive, enterprise-wide approach. Knowledge knowledge tools include the following: management capabilities and resources can be enabled through a unified information strategy, building on today’s platforms and • Complexity: Information tools are too complex, methodologies. and therefore out of reach for many employees. A unified knowledge management strategy will Extensive training may be needed bring together technical content from across the • Obsolescence: The technology in knowledge enterprise. Not only does such a strategy encourage management tools is often outdated, and the adoption of a “single pane of glass” for all content therefore lacking in needed functionality. It may resources; with content more searchable and be difficult to integrate data from obsolete accessible but also greater consistency across business solutions that may be used throughout the units and departments, with processes and rules enterprise aligned. In addition, a unified information strategy • Lack of transparency: Information may be enables intelligent tracking of usage and version difficult, if not impossible to locate. Again, control across all enterprise documents. As an added because information is maintained or stored bonus, the strategy enables greater collaboration across disparate systems, critical information or between business units and departments. data may be out of reach of those who require it to serve customers The following key elements form the foundation of a unified information strategy: • Fragmented solutions: As described in the previous section, knowledge management isn’t a single, definable category. Rather, it is often an Content as a Service assemblage of solutions drawn from a range of The KMWorld survey finds that cloud is disciplines. Often, these separate solutions becoming an increasingly dominant platform for require different skills sets, different data formats, hosting knowledge management systems. A total of and often may be challenging to interoperate. In 43% run their systems in the cloud, either in