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 t has been a little more than a year since we last published our list, and those 13 months saw far more than their share of turmoil. The tech sector has, well, tanked in many areas. Consolidation and downright business failures gained even greater momentum. Many surviving companies, even some listed here, have been trying to reposition themselves in that ever-moving target of technology. Which brings us to knowledge management. For reasons I have yet to fully understand, KM has always been an elusive-and sometimes even maligned-term. To be sure, there were some magnificent failures of KM initiatives, especially early on, precisely, I think, because far too many people just don’t understand what knowledge management really is-put three analysts, vendors or maybe even editors in a room, and you’ll get 10 different definitions.
Knowledge management is an attitude, not an application, and that’s what we’re celebrating with this list: Acknowledging and discovering an organization’s information assets and maximizing their use and reuse in every conceivable practical way is, simply, sound business. KM is the umbrella under which other disciplines fall, among them business intelligence, collaboration, competitive intelligence, content management, customer (and partner) relationship management, document management, expertise location, portals, unstructured data management workflow and so on. We’ve also recognized a number of consultancies and research firms for their contributions to KM. (Although a number of the companies mentioned in the list offer significant e-learning offerings, other e-learning solution providers will be acknowledged in the November/December issue of KMWorld’s new ’E-Learning World’ section.)
Just as in previous years, the list was conceived as a way to identify some of the organizations leading the way in the knowledge economy. It was compiled informally through discussions with colleagues, analysts, vendors (and their competitors) and has been designed to encourage the broader discussion of knowledge management. Criteria for inclusion varied, but all companies have things in common. Each has either helped to create a market, redefine one or enhance one, and they all share one thing媣elocity of innovation.
When we first published the list in 2000, many of the above-mentioned disciplines were in their relative infancy. XML was barely emerging as a format for describing network services. UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) was just entering beta testing, and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) was still a pretty slippery term to grasp. Back then, not many people could have foreseen that these technologies would evolve into the Web services that have so elegantly connected legacy applications to fuller functioned successors and added astounding capabilities to other software solutions.
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In 2000, the promise of the enterprise information portal seemed unlimited. Dozens of companies were touting their products-some were merely thin Web veneers, but others were substantial offerings. Over the ensuing two years, of course, some portal players started dropping like flies by night, and the once varied landscape became significantly less cluttered. Stronger companies were quick to acquire technology, and before long the portal began to deliver on much of its promise. While the portal market may have matured-though some would argue that the true enterprise information portal has yet to be developed-organizations want to exploit their value to the fullest. That said, portal providers have dramatically extended their offerings, and with the help of Web services, we’ve likely entered into the days of "portal as platform." We’ll see how long they last.
You筶l note quite a number of content management providers on our list, and we’ve heard about content being king for so long that it’s perhaps becoming a tiresome phrase. Not to stretch a metaphor too far, but if it were a chess piece, content is clearly queen-far more powerful and versatile than any sluggish, dim-witted monarch. When you combine full-scale enterprise content management with some of the technologies offered by unstructured data management, the result is a powerful discipline or technology arena that truly and effectively manages knowledge. Some of the consultants and researchers on our list do just that.
I’ll wager that as 2003 progresses, collaboration will step forward in the headline, we’ll certainly cover it in these pages the months ahead. Many of the companies listed below have made significant investments in collaboration suites, and with those come the need to address security, and access rights, and how to actually manage on a human level a truly collaborative enterprise. When you add content management and workflow into the mix, you’ll find an enlightened return to basics, because it’s fair to say that the times of the big new toy are over.
Organizations aren’t now looking to rebuild from the ground up; rather they are demanding to extract the value from existing technology and enhance it with solutions that actually work. That approach aligns precisely with what knowledge management really is-not software, per se, but a sensibility.
Remember, the purpose of the list is to generate interest and discussion about knowledge management tools and services--it’s not an award program. Send your comments to: kmcompanies@kmworld.com. |
