Knowledge management technology

Salesforce.com has acquired InStranet, a provider of knowledge management technology for business to consumer (B2C) call centers. The amount of the deal was approximately $31.5 million, which includes the assumption of $4.2 million in cash on Instranet's balance sheet.InStranet adds the customer's context, such as product or geography, to the knowledgebase to facilitate honing in on the right solution and eliminating irrelevant search results. In addition, because of the technology's open architecture, it provides rapid time to value, the companies claim, with deployments taking place in weeks as opposed to months. Salesforce.com is adding this technology innovation as a key component to Salesforce CRM Customer Service & Support, enhancing its Call Center and Customer Portal applications in use today by customers worldwide.

Resources for the Knowledge EconomySince the 1990s, Butterworth-Heinemann, an imprint of Elsevier, has been pleased to be one of the pioneering publishers in the area of knowledge management.Today, as KM has evolved to become one of the core competencies across competitive organizations, we continue to seek and present the best thinking and practice in innovation, intellectual capital, communities of practice, strategic information management, leveraging technology, and valuing intangibles. We are proud to showcase bestsellers like Leveraging Communities of Practice for Strategic Advantage by Hubert Saint-Onge and Debra Wallace, The Future of Knowledge by Verna Allee, The Springboard by Stephen Denning, and The Innovation Superhighway by Debra Amidon.

Each year, the technology and solutions nominated for these awards become increasingly sophisticated, on one hand, and increasingly intuitive on the other. Nearly gone are the days of complex and cumbersome deployments—those very factors that even a decade ago gave knowledge management a bit of a black eye. And although our panel of judges, who include colleagues, analysts, integrators and sometimes competitors, had a tough job narrowing down the award finalists, we all agreed that this year’s winners exemplify what can only be described as a new era of knowledge management, KM 2.0. —Hugh McKellar, KMWorld editor in chiefThe Criteria KM PROMISE AWARD Many companies promise that their technology is the best knowledge management solution. This award is given to the organization that is delivering on its promise to customers by providing innovative technology solutions for implementing and integrating knowledge management practices into their business processes

Advances in technology and emerging trends in community-driven web platforms have changed the ways we communicate, manage, and share knowledge.  As organizations continue to address key knowledge management challenges, one-way communication platforms are being eclipsed every day by tools that  facilitate richer dialogues and leverage the collective wisdom of experts throughout the organization.SAVO’s award-winning on-demand application offers more than just knowledge management. As the industry’s leading provider of sales enablement solutions, SAVO maximizes a sales organization’s ability to communicate value and differentiation in clear, consistent, and compelling ways.By harnessing the collective genius of the entire organization, by sharing best-in-class insights from experts across the enterprise, and by driving that expertise into every customer conversation, SAVO delivers profound front-line results to companies of all sizes.

User stories from the knowledge front A new report distribution system will allow travel giant Pilot Corporation to save time producing its monthly and weekly reports. An operator of travel center rest stops, convenience stores and fast-food restaurants, Pilot has chosen technology from Mobius Management Systems to automate its enterprise report management. “We needed to simplify the report distribution process for our remote users, provide faster access to reports and improve our archiving capabilities,” explains David DePrimo, manager of corporate systems for Pilot. The new system allows users to distribute reports directly from their desktops. “This will eliminate at least one day from our month-end report process, reduce the possibility of breakdowns in the process and enhance overall enterprise productivity,” DePrimo says.

A report from the McMaster World Congress The headline sums up perfectly what stuck in my mind at the 22nd annual McMaster World Congress. That exactly what was happening at the event, which was hosted by the university’s Management of Innovation and New Technology Research Centre at the Hamilton Convention Centre on Jan. 17 to 19. Organized and run by the students of McMaster's Michael G. DeGroote School of Business, the conference was a blend of business and academic theories and practice and concentrated on two major themes—The Management of Electronic Commerce and the Management of Intellectual Capital—and this report will focus on some of the KM highlights. Real-world KM stories Two organizations that have initiated KM projects in the last two years provided some solid tips and lessons they had learned from their experiences. Both started slowly and with manageable projects but have plans for more complex and strenuous activities in the future.

This article is intended to provide you with the basic building blocks for implementing your own knowledge management strategy and outline how successful knowledge management can produce tangible benefits for your business. Knowledge management is not a technology application, but a range of practices used by organizations to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge forreuse, awareness, and learning across an organization. Used with permission from Integrated Solutions magazine

Retailers are incorporating knowledge management into their processes to gain advantage over their competitors, enabling executives and lower level managers to quickly run reports on sales and other performance measures, to handle inventory better and to gain a clearer understanding of their products.New BI tool easier to useFor example, Ace Hardware is in the process of integrating WebFOCUS, a business intelligence (BI) application from Information Builders into its systems. The technology enables employees, suppliers and partners to run or write reports on a daily basis, if desired, compared to the previous system, which had capacity and scalability issues.

Lawyers were well represented (you might say) at this year's Enterprise Search Summit in New York. At times, ESS felt more like an e-discovery conference with analytics and social-computing side-tracks rather than a search conference featuring a few e-discovery sessions. Based on what I saw at the Search Summit, there seems to be a renewed awareness, at ever-higher levels in the corporate responsibility chain, that in a litigious business environment "enterprise search" is not just a knowledge-management tactic or a productivity aid, but a survival imperative. You will be sued some day. (It's not a matter of "if," but when.) During the discovery phase of the suit, you're going to provide (and also receive from the other side) bewilderingly immense amounts of data. Without good search technology, sifting through the data isn't just tedious but nightmarishly expensive.I didn't get a chance to attend any e-discovery sessions at the Search Summit

As an indication of the mainstream acceptance of knowledge management concepts, the world's largest information technology event, Comdex, Nov. 16 to 20, is including a pavilion dedicated expressly to KM.Comdex promotes the pavilion by saying, "Almost two decades after the term 'knowledge worker' entered the twentieth-century vocabulary, we are finally at a point where knowledge management is taking center stage. Vendors are now vying for turf in this hot market."Vendors scheduled to appear in the KM Pavilion include Tower Technology (www.towertechnology.com), Orbital Technologies (www.orbital-tech.com) and PC DOCS (www.pcdocs.com).