Content and knowledge management: an update

by Leslie Priest

In the fall of 1989 the headquarters of World Savings and Loan contained a brand-new operations center—a two-story building as big as a football field on San Francisco Bay—where one whole story contained rows of beautiful violet Steelcase file cabinets full of loan papers from 50 years.  And then the earthquake: in a few minutes of violent shaking those cabinets and their papers were strewn about the floor. As a result, we began a huge project to scan those loan files into a state-of-the-art image content database. Over a decade later, what is up with image and content/knowledge/document management? I went to the local roadshow of AIIM (The Association for Information and Image Management) in Denver last October 10 to find out.

What an eye-opening experience! The list of vendor exhibits crossed many of the traditional lines of products—from traditional document publication (Adobe, Corel, Documentum) to imaging/scanning systems (Fujitsu, Kofax), to web distribution (Livelink, Vignette). How are lowly practitioners of the art of communication like us to make sense of these products and guide our clients?

Below is a high-level look at the organizations and products from each technology sector represented. CM and KM are huge topics and this summary is just a toe in the water. Use the links at the end of the article to explore and learn.

The global term used throughout the AIIM show was ECM—Enterprise Content Management. What is the idea of Enterprise Content Management as represented by AIIM? Their website (www.aiim.org) gives us some clues:

"A lot has changed since AIIM was founded in 1943 as the National Microfilm Association…We believe that at the center of an effective business infrastructure in the digital age is the ability to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver enterprise content to support business processes. The requisite technologies to establish this infrastructure are an extension of AIIM's core document and content technologies. These Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technologies are key enablers of e-Business and include Content/Document Management, Business Process Management, Enterprise Portals, Knowledge Management, Image Management, Data Warehousing, and Data Mining.

That includes everything plus the kitchen sink, I think. See the Glossary at the end of this article for any vocabulary that may be new to you.

The only products missing from the AIIM mix seemed to be from the knowledge management (KM) crowd. They are holding their yearly convention (KMWorld) at the end of October, blending it with the Intranets 2002 conference. Here is what KMWorld organizers say of their upcoming convention:

Convening for its sixth year, KMWorld is the world's largest and most comprehensive conference and exposition dedicated to Content, Work, Collaboration, Knowledge and Intellectual Asset Management, and Business/Competitive Intelligence.

The two organizations, AIIM and KMWorld, and the products they represent, coordinate subtly under this guideline: the AIIM product core represents the "plumbing," the infrastructure, to capture, hold, and distribute content, while Knowledge Management products seek to make sense of the content in the eyes 
of the end users. They need each other.

But is the distinction clear? Consider a vendor who is showing at the KM meeting as a confusing example of placement in the pantheon of content and knowledge management systems:

"Factiva introduces Fusion, a content-enhancement offering that categorizes and creates relationships between business content sets.... Factiva Fusion  resolves the problems associated with inefficiencies of searching multiple internal and external systems and the challenge of finding relevant information in the myriad results returned by search engines…Factiva Fusion structures content for accurate retrieval and contextual integration into portals, intranets and other business applications. Factiva emphasizes it does not seek to replace existing portals, intranets and content management systems with Fusion, but to complement and enhance their performance by consistently organizing the content within those repositories." (www.factiva.com)

Confused? My advice: Get familiar with these organizations and the technologies they represent, so we can position our work and our confused clients to take strategic advantage of this sweeping array of enterprise solutions.

Technology 1: Content capture and storage

The beginning of content management is to capture content from a variety of resources, make it digital, and store it systematically. The original AIIM group that microfilmed mountains of paper with the aid of scanners are still in business today, but the computer servers and database engines are light years advanced. Vendors' products in this area are the most costly because of the hardware and physical implementation. But the need for this infrastructure is growing.

Technology 2: Content/cocument management and indexing

This technology encompasses many of our familiar doc/content activities but is overly complicated if we don't have strategic Technology #1 (content capture) in place. We want to manage content in nearly native format, index it with metadata accessible to search engines, control the content's versioning and lifecycle, and control users' access to it (security and protection were a hot conference topic this year). And we don't want the technology to get in the way of authors. We want the content to be accessible to any authors so they can update it quickly and efficiently and create active communities of knowledge sharers. One vendor's presentation slide summed this up: "Unify, Organize, and Optimize" the content. This is the technology most associated with the XML/structured content/metadata vendors, but most  misunderstood by our clients. Without Technology 1 and 2 in place, subsequent technologies will struggle and clients will be frustrated with the results.

Technology 3: Content distribution

Hot, sizzling products emerged from this group of vendors. "Intranet, extranet, hosted solutions, scalability, extensibility, broadcast…" Our clients understand this lingo and want it all. Our enterprise managers know their end users access multiple channels of information flow and have no patience with single distribution methods. But providers are faced with incredible challenges if the infrastructure is not in place to deliver and distribute content:

• Multiple repositories
• Multiple formats
• Multiple user types
• Multiple output devices
• Multiple relationships
• Multiple workflows

From an authoring point of view, this is the business requirement behind "single-sourcing."

Technology 4: User interface, search and retrieval

These scary statistics for 2002 were in every vendor's presentation:

• 40%--the average knowledge worker's time spent looking for information
• 70%--how often content is recreated rather than reused
• 200%--the annual rate at which content volume is growing

In this technology AIIM products coordinate with KM products. What good is plumbing/infrastructure and content management if the end-user community needs are not met? Most strategic proposals should begin with this analysis and then choose the underlying technologies 1, 2, and 3 to fulfill user requirements. An example of how it can go wrong: at Time Warner Telecom IT decided to implement 
Documentum doc management, but had not planned on inputting all the native intranet content. Thus, users had to perform Documentum searches of whatever metadata its document base had, plus do external searches of the native document base servers. And as the enterprise changed processes and moved Documentum items around into new user interface search hierarchies, Documentum would not let 
us adequately hide or delete the former organization. No wonder the users were upset!

Technology 5: Collaborative content creation and publishing

Content is just a collection of dead, inflexible objects, without a way to interact with it and grow it into a knowledge base to keep it alive. The statistic above—70% of the time we recreate content—comes from our need to add to it, say something about it, share it, connect other content to it, and make it useful for our lives. Even the most traditional authoring products, like those from Adobe, hype their ability to gather 
collaborative information together to publish richer content and keep it alive overtime. OpenText/Livelink and other collaborative multimedia vendors are redefining this realm of knowledge lifecycles. And it's tough on the structured technologies like XML to keep up with the creativity and flux brought on by collaboration and interwoven content.

Wrap up

So, was this short summary an eye-opening experience for you too? Many of us passionately believe in the world of content and knowledge management. We must aggressively seek to understand these technologies and be able to advise our clients about the net of interwoven communications technologies and strategies that surround us. Ten years from now I hope no one will have to grapple with a football 
field of scattered filing cabinets and mountains of useless paper.

Resources

• www.aiim.org AIM - Association for Information and Image Management. AIIM has started developing knowledge management (KM) standards to help the industry coalesce around a common process, theory, or philosophy for the way knowledge is managed. In early 1999, AIIM began developing several guideline reports to help organizations initiate KM projects and better manage their knowledge resources or intellectual capital. Those initial projects include a glossary of KM terminology; an introduction to knowledge management; and guidelines for the purchasing of KM tools, technology and services.
• www.KMWorld.com Convening for its sixth year, KMWorld is the world's largest and most comprehensive conference and exposition dedicated to content, work, collaboration, knowledge and intellectual asset management, and business/competitive intelligence. It offers a wide-ranging education program designed to meet the needs of strategic business technology decision-makers, as well as tactical point solutions managers and professional implementers.

KMWorld's online community is http://organik.kmworld.com/organik/orbital/home/organik_home.jsp

• KMWorld Buyer's Guide www.kmworld.com/publications/buyersguide/default.htm 
  An online complement to the popular print version of KMWorld's Buyer's Guide, this electronic resource will shorten your search for a vendor or simply help identify sources for KM tools. This is an easy-to-use source for KM hardware, software and consultation.
• www4.gartner.com – the Gartner group's Focus pages on knowledge and content management, and e-learning.
• www.doculabs.com Founded in 1993, Doculabs, Inc. is a research and consulting firm that improves the way companies plan for, select, and optimize emerging technologies through project-based services. Provides end-user and vendor consulting services to companies purchasing e-business technologies and to the leading vendors that supply them.
• Knowledge Management Consortium International (www.kmci.org KMCI)—Founded in 1997, KMCI views knowledge management from the organizational perspective, with the goal of providing practical applications of KM. It offers certification through its KMCI Institute, publishes a newsletter and a journal, and offers chapter meetings in Washington, D.C. and Denver.
• Knowledge Management Professional (www.kmpro.org KMPro)--KM Pro, established in 2001, is dedicated to promoting the practice of knowledge management and supporting the professional development of its members. It provides certification training, workshops, articles, and reports about KM, as well as chapter meetings and an innovation lab of KM technologies and services.
• Knowledge Management Roundtables www.icasit.org/km/kmrt In the Washington, D.C. area, KM Roundtable meetings are held approximately every three months in conjunction with Virginia's Center for Innovative Technology, the International Center for Applied Studies in Information Technology (ICASIT) and the Internet Technology Innovations Center. The KM Roundtables seek to advance the effectiveness 
  of KM practice in regional organizations. Recent programs covered KM metrics, the Knowledge Sharing Initiative (KSI) at NASA, and a look at the future of KM.
• www.cms-list.org - Content Management online user community. Cameron Barrett and Phil Suh founded and moderate this list. "We exist to help web professionals help each other learn about content management trends, tools, and ideas," Phil writes. "The cms-list began in July 2000, at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention held in Monterey, CA…Today, the list has over a two thousand members, and is the largest independent gathering of content management professionals online (at least, to my knowledge). Cam and I do our best to keep the discussions free from marketing spam, and focused on the issues, products, and practical experiences…"

Glossary

All terms below from Canadian Forest Service IT web site www.nrcan.gc.ca/cfs-
scf/science/prodserv/kmglossary_e.html.

Chief Knowledge Officer: the senior executive responsible for knowledge management and the knowledge infrastructure at the corporate level.

Content value: the economic or social utility of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom.

Digital library: a collection of a very large number of digital objects, comprising all types of material and media, that are stored in distributed information repositories and accessed through national computer networks.

Digitization: transforming data, information, knowledge, or physical objects from various media into digital objects.

Drill down: to access increasingly detailed data or information, starting from a high level of a hierarchical database or information base.

Expert system (ES): an information system that uses codified tacit knowledge in a knowledge base and an inference engine to solve problems that normally require significant human expertise.

Explicit knowledge: knowledge that has been formally expressed and transferred.
Inference engine: rule-based algorithms that interact with a knowledge base to draw conclusions about a set of inputs.

Information: data that has been interpreted, translated, or transformed to reveal the underlying meaning.

Information asset: information viewed as property; a commodity or product with associated costs and value.

Information base: database containing information (e.g., reports, documents, interpreted data).

Information management (IM): integrating information standards, processes, systems, and technology to enable the exchange of information among providers and users in order to support the management objectives of an organization.

Information overload: excess information beyond that desired or needed by a user, which requires nonproductive processing.

Information repository: an electronic database that contains documents or other digital objects.

Information retrieval: finding, accessing, and downloading digital information through networks

Information science: pure and applied science involving the collection, organization, and management of information.

Information society: a society in which people interact with technology as an important part of life and social organization to exchange information on a global scale.

Information theory: a statistical theory that measures information content and the efficiency of human–machine communication processes

Intelligence: an ability to learn and understand new knowledge or reason in new situations.

Knowledge: information from multiple domains that has been synthesized, through inference or deduction, into meaning or understanding that was not previously known.

Knowledge acquisition: eliciting and formally coding tacit knowledge into facts and rules and entering them in a knowledge base.

Knowledge asset: knowledge viewed as property; a commodity or product with associated costs and values.

Knowledge base: a database containing tacit knowledge in the form of formally coded facts and if-then-else decision rules.

Knowledge-based economy: an economy in which value is added to products primarily by increasing embedded knowledge content and in which the content value evolves to exceed the material value.

Knowledge content: the meaning that underlies data, information, knowledge, or wisdom.

Knowledge infrastructure: an integrated architecture of computers, systems, networks, and communication technology that supports horizontally integrated and vertically integrated knowledge management.

Knowledge initiative: building knowledge management capacity in terms of resources, knowledge infrastructure, and content, and developing an organizational context to implement that capacity through leadership, culture, and learning.

Knowledge integration: combining separate knowledge management programs into a more complete whole, coupled with adapting diverse groups into a coordinated knowledge-sharing culture.

Knowledge management (KM): promoting, coordinating, and facilitating knowledge synthesis, preservation, processes, production, and exchange in order to support the strategic goals of the organization.

Knowledge preservation: implementing processes to capture, archive, and protect explicit and tacit knowledge and to maintain accessibility to it as technology evolves for as long as the knowledge remains useful.

Knowledge processes: organizational context, human activities, content value, information systems, and information technology that are used to add value to content by increasing the amount of underlying processing and depth and breadth of meaning.

Knowledge product: knowledge that has been adapted to the needs of specific users.

Knowledge production: acquiring content, transforming it into a higher order of meaning and value, and disseminating it as knowledge products.

Knowledge representation: the framework and methods for coding tacit knowledge in a knowledge base.

Knowledge revolution: the global-scale transformation from an economy based on the value of material goods to one based on the value of knowledge.

Knowledge synthesis: using reasoning to integrate data and information from multiple domains to create a new meaning or understanding.

Knowledge worker: a person who creates information and knowledge.

Tacit knowledge: personal knowledge, gained through experience, that is influenced by beliefs, perspectives, and values.

Leslie Priest (www.roubalmapping.com/lpriest.htm) - 20 years as practitioner of knowledge management in Colorado and California, and member of STC RMC.