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Knowledge Management aka Business Intelligence other pages management | control

Setting the scene

In a 1998 article for Oracle Magazine,  Steven Telleen tells an old story:

A woman comes out of her office building after work on a dark winter evening. She sees one of her colleagues under a streetlight, searching for something. She asks if she can help. He explains that he has lost his car keys and would appreciate another set of eyes.

After some time of searching, the woman tries another strategy. She asks where he last saw his keys, so they can trace the path back to that point. He replies, "Oh, I know where I lost them," and points to a dark spot across the parking lot under a tree.

Flabbergasted, the woman asks, "If you lost the keys over there, why are you looking for them over here?"

To which he replies, "Because the light's better here."

What do organizations know about themselves?
What do they know about other organizations?
What do other organizations know about them?
Do they know what they tell? Do they tell what they know?

Most organizations don't know what they know. Most people in organizations can't get the information they need when they need it -- if they even know it's there to get.

Overview

How do ...

people learn and manage knowledge?

organizations learn and manage knowledge in the context of how people learn and manage knowledge?

supply chains and value chains learn and manage knowledge in the context of how organizations learn and manage knowledge?

Best Bet! Adam Pode's The Business Intelligence Page. It has concise definitions of:

environmental scanning | marketing intelligence | competitor analysis
tactical and strategic intelligence | competitive and business intelligence
intelligence cycle | intelligence principals | industrial espionage

Related terms

knowledge management | business intelligence | intranet | intellectual capital

enterprise content management | business process management
enterprise portals | data mining

John Thackara's definition: "the new alchemy for business?"

Capturing best practice, harnessing collective intelligence, sharing lessons learned, and harnessing the untapped value that lies among your staff and contacts. These are the powerful new tools of knowledge management

introductory overview from Knowledge Ability, a British consulting company

HelloBrain - The World's Intellectual Capital Exchange

what motivates people?

what motivates people? paychecks, prestige, ideas, fear

what motivates people in groups?

The Hype

Here's how the vendors toot their own horns:

lower social, technological, and process barriers that entrench knowledge and make it unavailable throughout an organization

leverage data, create highly available and scalable infrastructures, and optimize the capabilities of new innovations

capture what people know, involve employees in group collaboration, associate business processes with a business rules engine that drives the enterprise

AIIM -- Association for Information and Image Management

capture, create, customize, deliver, and manage enterprise content to support business processes

Who are the industry leaders?

These links will take you to their demos and other promotional material.

Cognos' Visualizer video

Information Builders' WebFOCUS demos

Business Objects' InfoView Wireless Edition demo

VMI Medical's EchoVACs screen shots

SmartLogik's Muscat demo

Kinecta's Interact demo

Quest's customer video clips

Documentum's content management tours

OpenText's Near & Far Designer viewer evaluation

Vignette's VTV videos

Interwoven TeamSite demos

Fatwire's UpdateEngine5 screen shots

eBusiness Technologies (EBT)'s Dynabase and engenda -- (click text to right of "Streaming Video")

Cardiff's LiquidForms screen shots

OpenText's Near & Far Designer viewer evaluation; Vignette's VTV videos

Tacit

expertise automation -- automatically and continuously inventory the skills and talents of your entire organization, so people can dynamically find and connect with the expertise they need - when they need it.

Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP)

Competitive Intelligence | A systematic and ethical program for gathering, analyzing, and managing external information  that can affect your company's plans, decisions, and operations.

Other web sites:

Competia
Corporate Information
CI Seek
Spyonit

Readings

A couple of years ago, Steven Telleen posted three short but potent articles on his iorg.com Web site.

Do you really want an intranet?

Intranets support and encourage a definite management and cultural style, one that may not be compatible with their incumbent managers.

The Intranet Paradigm

Intranets encourages distributed decision-making, modular organizations, open communication, and application of employee knowledge.

Intranets as Knowledge Management Systems

The oldest human knowledge base is culture. The knowledge is stored as stories and rituals. When looking at intranets as knowledge bases, it might be useful to look at how culture acts as a modifiable (learning)  knowledge management system as it interacts with the individuals that make it up. 

Knowledge Management Reading List
by Randy M. Kaplan
Accsys Corporation

Knowledge Management Magazine

e-doc magazine

The Case Against Knowledge Management
by Thomas A. Stewart
Business 2.0, February 2002

Companies waste billions on knowledge management because they fail to figure out what knowledge they need, or how to manage it.

When Bad Things Happen to Good Ideas
by Eric Berkman
Darwin, April 2001

Knowledge management revolves around the concept that one of the most valuable corporate assets is the experience and expertise floating around inside employees' heads. In order to manage this intellectual capital, executives must devise a way to capture and share that knowledge with coworkers. If done right, KM is supposed to create a more collaborative environment, cut down on duplication of effort and encourage knowledge sharing—saving time and money in the process. The problem is, in many cases KM devolved into a purely technical process, resulting in expensive software implementations sitting unused by oblivious, fearful or resentful employees.

How to Beat Corporate Alzheimer's
by Dylan Tweney
Business2.0, October 2001

For as long as people have been keeping records, they've struggled to find efficient ways to file their work. Ancient Assyrians, who scratched records on clay tablets, stored documents in pigeonholes in the walls of libraries, writing a list of each room's contents on the wall -- a kind of primitive database.

While modern technology has advanced well beyond clay tablets, databases still require that information be stored away in precisely defined fields, the digital equivalent of those pigeonholes.

But in most companies, there are valuable stores of data tucked away on employees' hard drives, on Web servers, and on the company intranet: Word documents, PowerPoint slides, spreadsheets, e-mail, and so on. Such files represent, by some estimates, as much as 80 percent of a company's information assets.

Good luck finding much of use in this heap of unstructured data.

To mine these documents, many companies are turning to so-called knowledge management (KM) technologies.

strategy

Formal Ontology
edited by Raul Corazzon

Ontology is the theory of objects and their ties. The unfolding of ontology provides criteria for distinguishing various types of objects (concrete and abstract, existent and non-existent, real and ideal, independent and dependent) and their ties (relations, dependences and predication).

Sounds like pages and links to me. The Web.

LADSEB-CNR's Papers on Ontological Foundations of Conceptual Modelling and Knowledge Engineering where you find such page-turners as Atomicity vs Divisibility of Space, in Freksa, C., & Mark, D. M. (eds.), Proceedings of Spatial Information Theory

Fortune: Knowledge management column by Tom Stewart
CIO: Knowledge management column by Tom Davenport
Wall Street Journal: Friday Front Lines column by Tom Petzinger
Journal of Business Strategy, January-February 1998 v. 19 (Special Issue)
Long Range Planning: Special Issue on Intellectual Capital, June 1997
Forbes ASAP: Special Issue on Intellectual Capital, April 7, 1997
Organizational Dynamics: Theme Issue on "The Learning Organization: Applications and Results," Summer 1998
Knowledge Inc.: Monthly executive newsletter (Quantum Era Enterprises)

crisis management

issues

proprietary / open
applications / tools / tools to make tools
silo / cross-functional
IT / end users: The Geek Line