Latest Knowledge Management News & Articles

Have I mentioned recently how much I truly hate the term "social business"?

Maybe hate is a bit strong, and it's really not the term, but the way it is used. However, as I was struggling to finalize my contribution to this month's Social Business theme, I was saved by a fellow author's article: Knowledge Management in 2012: Probably Dead by Roan Young (@roanyoung).

Last week Forrester taught us about the issues of mobile device management within the enterprise. The next day it released a report that helped us put it in perspective.

Last week, Index Engines provided its take on how to best prepare and manage corporate data. The discussion didn’t end there, however. Today, Symantec released its 2011 Information Retention and e-Discovery Survey, which examined the retention policies of the enterprise. The survey reveals that  email is no longer the most commonly requested records companies must produce — further complicating the way information and the kinds of information are managed. 

We thought this was the perfect opportunity to have Symantec weigh in. We asked Greg Muscarella, senior director of product management for Symantec’s Information Management Group, the same three questions about how to effectively manage your corporate data. 

How many meetings are worth the time that we invest? What if the content of a meeting could be useful, usable and immediate?

Barb Mosher set the scene for this month's CMSWire focus on communities (or at least, online communities!) with her thought-provoking piece, "Communities: We All Want to Belong, or Do We?"

Barb references a definition of communities from David Coleman (founder and MD of Collaborative Strategies): "Communities rely on the strength of social ties, where your being there is important." I would add that in this case, "being there" includes in a virtual mode, as in logging on and taking part in the online communities activities.

Too often companies say one thing and mean another. In the case of SnapLogic (news, site), part of the funding received in December of 2010 was earmarked for expansion into Europe. It delivered on the promise.

Each year KMWorld (news, site) publishes a list of the cream of the crop in knowledge management. "100 companies That Matter" includes favorites from practitioners, analysts, theorists and customers, recognizing orgs whose innovations have had significant impact on the constituency chain as a whole. 

We're continuing January with expert articles on everything from A to Z. Read on for tips on topics like SharePoint success and business collaboration, or if you're interested in reading about how Web Analytics Demystified's founder Eric T. Peterson totally schooled me on measuring social influence in the enterprise. 

All the excitement about Quora these past few days has us curious — could Quora be a model for an effective enterprise knowledge management tool?

In an ideal world, governance and social media go hand-in-hand. The Philippine government, starting with the newly-installed administration of President Benigno Aquino III, has embraced social media as a means of extending services to its constituents, particularly by feeding vital information on security, disasters and something as commonplace as traffic.

Luis Suarez of IBM — the 2.0 Adoption Council’s 2010 Internal Evangelist of the Year — mesmerizes the hapless interviewer. His enthusiasm for one of his favorite topics, life without email, bleeds into several records and information management-related disciplines — a fact he’s only too happy to acknowledge and gleefully share with everyone.

Bill Kaplan, CPCM is a retired US Air Force colonel who after a lifetime of successful implementations for other companies founded his own knowledge management consulting group last year: Working Knowledge^CSP. His path is a textbook example of success — always the most difficult kind.

Washington D.C. based VIDIZMO (news,site) announced support for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 in the cloud-based and on-premise editions of its interactive training tool. VIDIZMO provides solutions for training, compliance, corporate communication, knowledge-sharing and organizational development for small to midsize organizations, educational institutions, government and healthcare.

 

Caveat emptor is Latin for ”buyer beware”; this gem of wisdom has been passed down to us from Roman times, and in some ways it’s an example of Knowledge Management (KM) in action — a nugget of ‘knowledge’ that countless generations have found to be valuable, and so passed on by word of mouth, clay tablets, scrolls or more recently books and websites!

When you consider your organization's KM strategy in the context of your content management and collaboration environments, then I would re-iterate “buyer beware”, particularly the be wary of any vendor who wants to sell you an “end to end” knowledge management solution.

I would suggest there is no such thing as a “KM system” as in a single piece or suite of software, in the mold of “one ring to rule them all”.

The next time those in the academic world suggest any miscommunication is an issue of semantics, they might not be wrong.

Elsevier, the publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, has acquired Collexis, a developer of semantic technology and knowledge discovery software.
 

Are private social networks becoming entrenched in Enterprise 2.0 businesses with sophisticated sales forces? "We're not there yet," states Jennifer King, Director of Sales, Central Region for SAS Canada, the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. SAS is one of many software companies involved in complex solution selling. "Our sales teams are knowledgeable with many years of experience," states King. "They are just getting their feet wet when it comes to understanding public social networks."

Last week, we pondered the fate of acronyms — namely GRC. Continuing the conversation, we sat down with CA’s (news, site) Marc Camm, senior vice president and general manager of GRC Products, and Peter Stapleton, senior principal product manager for CA GRC Manager, to discuss their thoughts about what Governance, Risk and Compliance will look like in 2010 and beyond.

Back in December we remarked about the trouble with generic acronyms and what they contribute (if anything) to web content management.

This year the same argument unfolds around another acronym, GRC. On the Gartner Blog Network, French Caldwell recently wrote about the war on governance, risk and compliance.

On July 17 Open Atrium (news, site) was introduced to the world. The software is a distribution of the popular open source Drupal CMS framework (news, site) packaged up in the form of an intranet and knowledge management tool.

A mere 75,000 downloads later, Open Atrium now support 31 languages at varying levels of translation. The team behind this social business software used by small groups working together as well as large, geographically distributed organizations, has some firm ideas about the future.

There are numerous knowledge management systems (KMS) out there not related to SharePoint, and even Sean Squires and Lincoln DeMaris, Microsoft Project Managers, admitted that Microsoft was not fully using SharePoint for their KMSs. Their goal was to use SharePoint 2010 offerings to build a brand new internal KMS with mainly OOTB solutions.

This session at the SharePoint Conference was based on a case study on one of several KMS at Microsoft. In a nutshell, it represents a repository of high-quality, field-ready content with case studies, white papers, marketing materials, etc., that allows Microsoft to engage with customers.