Markets

1. What is Knowledge Management?
2. How does our technology help?
3. How should a Knowledge Management system be designed?

Knowledge management is about the sharing of knowledge; about letting the right hand know what the left is doing; and about not re-inventing the wheel!

Knowledge management is based on three 'legs'. First, obviously, is the knowlege which it is about. Frequently this is intellectual property, an asset in its own right. Secondly, it is about the culture (and this often implies a cultural change) of sharing, rather than hoarding, knowledge. And thirdly it is about the technology which makes that knowledge ('information') shareable.

In a sense, of course, knowledge management has always been around. At base, most companies are in fact knowledge manipulators. However, modern technology allows that knowledge to be shared across time and geographical barriers in a way that simply was not feasible before. On the down side, modern IT has made so much 'knowledge' available that it has created the problem of 'information overload', which we need to solve. And one key element in all this is the internet - or rather, the intranet.

Our technology IS the technology leg of Knowlege Management. It can therefore be used to solve key problems in knowledge management:

• Connecting people with people, in a continuously changing environment: Concept Engine
• Finding knowledge: documents, people, & images: researching.
• Distilling knowledge and preventing "information overload": the summarising.

Not as a system, in fact. As a peer-to-peer interaction of 'tools' which enable users to access the stored knowledge.

The knowledge should be kept separate from the tools which find and manipulate it. Why? Because if you try to store knowledge in a database you hit a number of problems: 1) when you want to retrieve it, the structure you created to store it in will be wrong, since your needs have changed; 2) it requires work for users to put the knowledge in - they generally just won't do it.

In our view, the best architecture is to store the 'knowledge' as documents on an intra-net. Advanced tools are used to find and distill the knowledge as, when, and how required. Since the tools do not embed the knowledge (like a traditional database would), they can be upgraded or replaced at will.

This architecture also enables people to be found. (As in "who else is working on new refrigeration techniques?") The way to do this is to have a 'personal' page for each person, which describes both their interests and expertise. Now the same tools that will find documents will find those people where appropriate - and reduce the re-inventing of the wheel.