Managing Knowledge

A booming economy, disparate sources of information, rising salaries, attrition, push to create a 'knowledge economy' - all of this justifies the effort that many leading companies are putting into managing knowledge. With IT spends increasing, especially in the booming financial services industry, apportionment towards seemingly niche areas is increasing.

Business is slowly moving away from a 'seat of the pants' sort of approach. Infusion of fresh MBAs, management techniques, strategy driven approaches, focus on long-term RoI - all this smacks of a new wave of business acumen. And during such times, business houses are also learning to negotiate the common problem of knowledge centricity or person-dependency.

The other driver for knowledge management is - 'how soon can I access the data that I want?'. How soon can business access mission-critical information? The information may already be there, but relational linking might not have been considered. This scenario may have arisen due to price sensitivity of technology upto five years ago. But with cost of database and access technology on a downward spiral, these worries no longer impact technology-upgrade decisions as seriously as they used to in the past.

Technologies assist in managing knowledge from various stand-points - portal based access management to data repositories, RSS feeds management, drill-down, access to external or proprietary database via connectors, segregation of duties, version control, auto-refresh etc.

Various software vendors have their own knowledge management solutions aimed specifically at fulfilling the knowledge needs of verticals such as finance, manufacturing etc. IBM, Microsoft, Interwoven and Documentum span the breadth of Knowledge Management right from collaboration to document management. Inter-operability of technologies and open standards engineering make access across various flavours of environments seamless. Niche vendors such as Kalzoom and CMIE (the economy monitoring behemoth) are also making a play in this space.

RoI is a big question especially before SMEs make an investment in a sophisticated solution. Judgement of RoI should not be wrongly taken on a short-term basis. Instead RoI should be calculated on an annual to 3 year basis. Metrics such as quantum of 'access effort' saved etc. should be clearly measured to arrive at RoI.