Knowledge Management Solutions Integration
- Haim Dror
- Jan 1, 2005
- 6 min read
The knowledge management market is experiencing a renewed awakening after approximately two years of decline. Many organizations are investing significant resources to advance knowledge management solutions, and the market is saturated with "mature and stable" but isolated solutions. Organizations, particularly knowledge managers, are "bombarded" by diverse solutions such as document management, content management, task management, process management, and risk management. The problem is that each vendor bases their specific solution on different architecture and technology, so the solutions don't effectively communicate. Therefore, the next challenge in knowledge management is integrating knowledge management solutions into one complete solution from the end user's perspective.
This is where SES (Smart Enterprise Suite) enters the picture - "Integration of knowledge management solutions into a unified environment."
Integration is an "old-new" challenge facing most organizations: "old" because the IT market has been talking about the need for integration for years, and "new" because integrating knowledge management solutions into a unified solution has not been on the agenda until now.
Here are several examples of the need for integration of knowledge management solutions:
Central and unified information repository
A central and unified information repository is a basic condition for organization-wide knowledge management. Managing a central repository where all content is managed enables smart, simple, and reasonably priced retrieval and sharing capabilities. On the other hand, various knowledge management solutions based on different technologies and separate information repositories make it difficult to manage all content in the organization and harm functionality and performance.
Unified multi-dimensional knowledge tree
Each knowledge management solution currently includes (if at all) its own private "knowledge tree." As known, managing a "knowledge tree" is one of the prominent challenges in knowledge management, and therefore, managing many knowledge trees without synergy between them is a difficult and practically impossible task - hence the need for managing a unified knowledge tree for all knowledge management applications that allows for collectively managing all information objects in the organization: documents, presentations, emails, tasks, DB tables, audio clips, video clips, operational system windows, sub-objects, sub-knowledge trees, web content.
Security
The field of knowledge management poses a new challenge in information security - in addition to classic security methods that mainly deal with system security, knowledge management raises the need for content security according to its states (storage, distribution, sending, receiving, retrieval (navigation/search)). Establishing a proper security system in knowledge management is a difficult challenge that requires infrastructure investments and integration of security functionality as part of the knowledge management system. Information security is one of the engines driving the need for unified knowledge management methods based on a unified platform.
There are many more examples of the need for unified knowledge management solutions over a unified infrastructure, such as simplicity of training and implementation processes based on an organizational structure supporting knowledge management, unified management and maintenance of all knowledge management solutions, homogeneous environment for the user, reducing the development cost of each separate solution, synergy between knowledge management solutions and resource management solutions, and incorporating the idea of knowledge-based resource management... the list is long, but the idea seems clear.
In May 2002, Gartner first presented its SES (Smart Enterprise Suite) concept. According to Gartner, SES is defined as:
The portal, collaborative, and enterprise content management technologies combine all three capabilities as one integrated package.
SES promises a broad foundation for supporting knowledge or information work within or between groups within or outside the organization. Thanks to this, SES is considered a leading platform for knowledge management.
The authors of this article present an expanded concept of the SES idea, which was developed after an in-depth analysis and study of the field.
The idea of SES is a "smart solution package" that provides high integration between all components supplied or developed by sub-suppliers as additions to the package. SES is an innovative idea, and experts still have no consensus regarding its contents, scope, and positioning. Additionally, organizations' functional requirements for SES are not mature. Still, an analysis of case studies worldwide and in Israel reveals a clear need for the SES concept to be a successful generator in implementing knowledge management in organizations. It is worth emphasizing that SES is essentially an infrastructure, so it is expected that even in the future, small and agile companies will develop knowledge management applications tailored to specific markets on top of SES.
A knowledge management solution based on SES needs to cover four central areas leading the organizational knowledge management market:
Portal technology
Process management
Content management
Collaboration tools
Several notes:
Process management is not clearly defined as part of SES (some experts see process management as a component in the content management domain). In any case, the process management component must fully integrate with the other components.
A certain level of integration between knowledge management components exists today (shared area in the diagram), but the reality is still far from the vision.
Here, we will not detail the capabilities required in the portal domain and content management (including document management and more). But beyond these, complementary knowledge management capabilities are required:
The original SES concept (portal, content, collaboration) needs to be connected with additional technological components shared by the three core components of SES:
"Integrative display" - The purpose of SES is to organize the existing chaos and help organizations build a "smart solution basket" for knowledge management tailored to the organization's needs. Integrative display is possible thanks to portals’ functional capabilities to expose any content object as a "window" (Portlet, WebPart). In the era of SOA architecture and Web Services technology, the portal window can expose any object regardless of where it was created.
"Unified multi-dimensional knowledge tree" - A future portal needs to manage a generic multi-dimensional knowledge tree that will provide "knowledge tree" services to all knowledge management applications. As such, the era of multiple unrelated and disconnected knowledge trees supplied to the organization with each separate application ends. It's important to internalize that in the not-too-distant future, with the help of a generic knowledge tree in the portal, the user will be able to reach any information object through logical, convenient, and intuitive navigation, regardless of its storage location, to any window and any dedicated application in the organization.
"Information retrieval" - Indexing and search capabilities are the most basic capabilities in information retrieval. More advanced capabilities are information categorization, taxonomy, and expertise management. SES provides a good infrastructure for implementing retrieval capabilities based on the content management system built into it.
"Business Process Management" - The technological infrastructure in information-intensive organizations needs to support knowledge workers while considering current requirements: dosage, availability, and reliability of information. This infrastructure includes, on one hand, business process management and, on the other hand, handling content and sharing between people while maintaining a close connection between these worlds, which until now were handled separately. This opens various ways to connect people, processes, systems, and information, from there to efficiency, business agility, and savings.
"Business Intelligence" - Retrieving information from organizational content sources, analyzing it using graphical and intuitive tools, and distributing the knowledge created to different users in a format suited to their needs.
SES - Advantages and Disadvantages:
Like everything, the SES concept has many advantages and some disadvantages.
Advantages of SES:
Drastic reduction of integration costs between existing and new knowledge management applications in the organization.
Focuses the organization on real needs.
Provides true content integration through a generic multi-dimensional knowledge tree that aggregates dedicated knowledge trees.
This simplifies information security efforts since planning a security solution in one solution is implemented in the other.
Disadvantages of SES:
Appears intimidating due to its size.
Requires longer planning times.
In conclusion, SES links various functional capabilities in knowledge management. The goal is to provide one package with more diverse functionality, a collection of integrated technologies. This integrated package has many capabilities and advantages over each product separately. Organizations planning to introduce knowledge management solutions need to properly plan for the long term to succeed in the near term—that is, proper planning of organizational SES architecture will allow the organization to choose specific solutions with low investment costs that will continue to integrate optimally with the organizational SES infrastructures.
Do we have a complement to the famous ERP here? Time will tell.
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