Best Practices in Enterprise Knowledge Management
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Best Practices in Enterprise Knowledge Management Andy Moore . 2 Passing the Cringe Test: Has KM Made It to Prime Time? Once upon a time, saying the words “knowledge management” was the fastest way to get thrown out of a meeting. And not only would you be ejected, you would never be invited back. Paul Sonderegger, Endeca . 4 People Judge Relevance. Machines Calculate Evidence. Does the man make the machine? Or the machine make the man? A pilot can't fly without a plane. A doctor can’t diagnose without a centrifuge. Daryl Orts, Noetix . 6 How to Correctly Design and Implement a Dashboard A dashboard is a vital tool for monitoring the daily health of your organization. From a sin- gle interface, decision makers have access to key performance indicators (KPIs). Hadley Reynolds and Silvija Seres, FAST . 8 Building the Search Center of Excellence Search is strategic; however, the strategic potential of search is not captured by the act of acquiring a powerful search platform alone. InQuira . 10 Implementing KM: Practitioners Share Best Practices Most customer service organizations today will admit that effective knowledge transfer is the most crucial element to resolving customer problems. Brandon Lackey, BEA, and . 12 Mistakes to Avoid and Principles for Success Michael Behounek, Emerja Many organizations today still struggle to get value from their knowledge management (KM) efforts. Even companies that have been benchmarked as the “best practice” can easily fall. Jeff Dirks, SchemaLogic . 14 Knowledge is Power: Best Practices in Semantics Management Knowledge is power. The meaning of the phrase is even more applicable today as companies around the world are dealing with an overwhelming amount of data. Anand Chopra, KANA . 16 Answering Customers’ Questions the Intelligent Way Enterprises face a difficult challenge when simultaneously improving the quality of service and reducing costs. More products and rapid change substantially increase the amounts of information. Gordon Taylor, TOWER Software . 17 Knowledge at the Point of Decision A small, two-legged robot stands atop a glass-topped coffee table. On its two dimensional world, it has to contend with a potted plant, an old TV Guide and several coffee cups. Laurent Simoneau, Coveo . 18 Enterprise Search: The Foundation for Risk Management If you can’t find it, you can’t manage it. Unfortunately, many executives have discovered this too late in the game—when they face legal troubles or a corporate scandal. Jon Parsons, XyEnterprise . 19 Realizing Measurable ROI with Multi-Language Content Management What is content management worth? That can be a philosophical question. If you ask a content author, you’ll hear about the way content creation and review is made easier. Dan Dube, DocZone.com . 20 Hosted XML Content Management: Is It Right for You? Publishing organizations have long recognized the value of migrating content to XML to attain the benefits of content reuse, reduced localization costs and single-source publishing. Gregory F. Roberts, Lockheed Martin . 21 Who is that “he?”—Using Pronouns and Anaphors in Text Extraction Text extraction is a powerful tool to find and categorize elements in unstructured documents. These elements, or entities, are connected together to form the relationships, facts and events. Andrew Cohen, KNOVA Software . 22 Beyond First Call Resolution Knowledge management (KM) initiatives are one way of improving technical support organizations, driving support margins through efficiency and increased customer loyalty. Chip Gettinger, Astoria Software . 23 The Hidden Costs of Product Information Publishing Manufacturing enterprises have placed a sustained focus on information management solutions to support and augment the design, development and production process. Premium Sponsors KMWorld November/December 2006 Andy Moore is a 25-year publishing Passing the Cringe Test professional, editor and writer who concentrates on business process Has Knowledge Management Made It to Prime Time? improvement through document and content management. As a publication By Andy Moore, Editorial Director, KMWorld Specialty Publishing Group editor, Moore Andy Moore most recently was editor-in-chief and co-publisher of KMWorld Magazine. He is now publisher of KMWorld Magazine and its related online publications. Once upon a time, saying the words crete,” insisted Sally Hicks, marketing “knowledge management” was the fastest manager at Noetix. “Our biggest dashboard Moore acts as chair for the “KMWorld Best way to get thrown out of a meeting. And not customer is Florida Rock. Their name says Practices White Papers,” overseeing editorial only would you be ejected, you would never content, conducting market research and writing it all—they move rocks. It’s not sexy. But the opening essays for each of the white papers be invited back. they allow their customers to log in through in the series. That was then, but this is now. I asked a a secure dashboard and get a few basic panel of experts not only whether KM was pieces of data, and it’s saving hundreds of He has been fortunate enough to cover emerging finally ready to pass the “cringe test,” but man-hours per week. Their customers areas of applied technology for much of his career, ranging from telecom and networking what it would take to propel KM to even don’t know the terminology of ‘knowledge greater prominence as an enterprise set of through to information management. In this role, management.’ They just want a copy of an he has been pleased to witness first-hand the solutions. And I was surprised—and invoice.” decade’s most significant business and pleased—at the reactions. “We are able to now talk about knowl- organizational revolution: the drive to leverage “One of the big failures of knowledge edge management without the audience organizational knowledge assets (documents, management, and the reason it had the rep- rolling their eyes,” said Sivija Seres, records, information and object repositories) to utation it had, is that it tries to solve prob- FAST’s VP of strategic business develop- improve performance and improve lives. lems at too much of a macro level,” said ment, “but we have learned a lot. People Moore is based in Camden, Maine, and can be Brandon Lackey. Brandon is the global have been told one thing at a marketing reached at [email protected]. solutions director for BEA Systems. “They level, but it’s difficult to achieve those tried to build a database of everyone’s things when it scales greatly and gets more knowledge, and it can’t be done. The suc- complex, and more features creep up into cessful systems may go in under the basis the original specification,” said Silvija. The KM Formula of knowledge management, but they “Recently, the technology—not the core, address very specific business problems.” If KM is now accepted among polite but the functionality—and our understand- So can you “talk about KM” during company, what’s holding up its widespread ing of how to set things up from the begin- these meetings? “You can, in pockets,” adoption? “We always come back to the ning has reached a level that we can be noted Paul Sonderegger, the principal same fundamental thing: people can’t get really proud of.” strategist and “evangelist” at Endeca. the information they need to do their jobs,” Unmet expectations is a common theme “There are companies that are more said Sally Hicks. “Even if IT is helping get dependent than others on the movement of in technology deployments, of course. But information to people, they don’t get it information in order to affect the bottom maybe it’s worse in KM, because the goals quickly enough, or it changes. Sometimes line. Take a professional service organiza- are often so ambiguous. “The problem with the users don’t even know what it is they tion—a consulting company, for instance. asking users to describe what they want is want; they just know they need something Its whole ability to leverage the work their like the old saw about Henry Ford,” in order to make a decision.” consultants do depends on their ability to remarked Paul Sonderegger. “If Ford had The theme of “information+decision= take information others have created and asked people what they wanted, they would knowledge management” is practically apply it in another context. In that kind of have said ‘faster horses.’ Luckily, there is a universal. “What’s the connection between environment, yes...you can absolutely talk rising generation of managers who have a information and action?” asked Paul, entirely about knowledge management.” greater baseline of familiarity with technol- rhetorically. “It’s the assessment of the prob- Tim Shetler, vice president, marketing ogy than the departing generation. They’re lem and the appropriateness of available at InQuira, thought his company knew the still not technologists, but they have new solutions. Before you can do anything logisti- difficulty in the terminology: “We deliber- ideas about what they want from their cally—like shipping something from one ately named our product ‘Information infrastructure.” place to another to fix a problem—someone Manager’ to avoid any issues with the term Lowell Anderson, VP marketing at has to assess the problem, and become satis- ‘knowledge management.’ We discovered SchemaLogic, agreed with that assessment. fied they have identified the right solution. they don’t exist! We thought there would “There’s definitely an increased awareness And that’s ALL about decision-making. It’s be some tarnish around the term. But every of the capabilities that a focused KM strat- the information being brought to the person RFP I look at uses the phrase ‘knowledge egy can bring to an organization. As that allows us to talk about the application management.’ The end users don’t have we become familiar with collaboration of knowledge.” that baggage.” techniques, people are becoming more Of course, as is often the case, it’s easi- It’s probably a matter of whom you ask, comfortable with moving away from fixed er said than done.