Clearing obstacles to true knowledge management

Study illuminates risk of failing to address "human hurdle" of information overload

According to a just-released survey from KPMG, large companies understand the value of a fully implemented knowledge management program, but the complete benefits of such a regime are being missed.

KPMG surveyed chief executives, finance directors, marketing directors and those with specific responsibility for KM at a total of 423 organizations--each with annual revenues of more than $270 million in Europe, the United States and elsewhere. The business sectors in which these companies engaged were broken down like this: financial services (22%); industrial products (20%); consumer markets (20%); chemicals, pharmaceuticals and energy (14%); government (2%); information, communication, entertainment (2%); services (13%); transport (5%) and others (2%).

Nearly 75% of those surveyed were looking to KM to serve an "extremely significant" or "significant" role in improving competitive advantage, marketing and customer focus. About 65% would benefit product innovation, revenue growth and profit. Employee development was cited by 57%. Nearly three-quarters (71%) believe KM leads to better decision making, and about 65% view it as achieving faster response to important business issues and better customer handling.

As would be expected, less than half of the companies with a KM program reported having to "reinvent the wheel," compared with nearly two-thirds for those that didn't. Information access was another key: 61% could profile buying habits of particular customers better; 72% could get access to an agreed-upon methodology within half a day as opposed to 55% without; 78% were able to identify who last spoke with a customer; 64% could find out why their company won a new account.

On the other hand, KPMG discovered respondents with a KM program tend to see immediate, internal cost gains but don't equate them with external, longer and more far reaching benefits such as intellectual capital growth. While 28% believe KM would increase their share price, almost three times that many think it will reduce costs and increase profits.

Some 75% of the respondents either with or considering a KM system saw the decision driven by senior management or from the board level. They also believe that KM must be a companywide initiative. However, KPMG discerns that the board and upper level management view KM only in terms of return on investment rather than larger issues. Of the 36% of respondents who reported the benefits failed to meet expectations, the following reasons were most often cited (they were able to give more than one reason): ?lack of user uptake owning to insufficient communication (20%); ?failure to integrate KM into everyday working practices (19%); ?inadequate time to learn the system or the belief it was too complicated (18%); ?lack of training (15%); ?belief there was too little personal benefit for the user (13%)

Generally, the pitfalls of a KM program--even for those who had implemented one--were seen to be: ?lack of time to share knowledge (62%); ?failure to use knowledge effectively (57%) ?the difficulty of capturing tacit knowledge.

KPMG points to organizations' failure to grasp the cultural implications of KM. While such a program should remove employee frustration, only a third of the companies actually had KM policies that spelled out the priority of knowledge elements. Even less than a third (31%) rewarded knowledge working. Only 18% had a knowledge map that indicated what information is available.

And, according to the survey data, just 16% of the respondents of companies that either implemented (or considered implementation of) a KM regime actually measure "intellectual capital" or the intangible value of knowledge, innovation and relationships. That figure explains why so few companies value KM as a means by which to increase stock value. Less than half of the respondents that had or were considering KM programs viewed it as a way to attract and retain staff, and only 30% actually achieved it.

KPMG concludes that companies view knowledge management as a purely technological solution. As such, they have employed the tools at their disposal: ?93% use the Internet to access external knowledge; ?78%, an intranet; ?63%, data warehouse or mining; ?61%, document management systems; ?49%, decision support; ?43%, groupware ?38%, extranets.

Although companies do employ technology, they fail to take full advantage of it. The survey revealed that only 16% of the companies using relevant technology have a system specifically designed for KM. So, it appears that formal implementation of KM is a way off. KPMG concludes that the majority of companies are only at the first two stages (of five) in the KM journey. Only 10% are at stage 4, and just 1% at the highest level.

XML and EIPs: Open Information Integration

As the Web quickens the pace of business, the pressure is on to make fast decisions across the organization. These decisions often require access to information located in disparate, scattered data sources-including unstructured data like content in emails, Word documents, or even graphics. Providing corporate decision-makers with a single point of access to all of this enterprise information is essential.

As companies partner to build business-to-business (B2B) applications, open information integration is even more essential. E-Business is about integration-to conduct B2B operations, decision-makers and their IT systems must be connected across organizational boundaries. Companies must be able to share information between their enterprise systems to conduct business together over the Web. As they share common data outside the enterprise, B2B companies must also protect valuable information assets.

Enterprise Information Portals (EIPs) provide a single point of access to enterprise information, solving many of the problems of information access within and among enterprises. Using EIPs, corporate users can access structured data residing in enterprise systems-such as databases or data warehouses-as well as unstructured data such as Word documents, emails, audio/video files, and graphics.

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a valuable asset for EIPs, helping to provide the open information integration that will fuel e-business.

What is XML?
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup (tagged) data format that can be used to define the metadata associated with the content of Web resources and other data. In plain terms, XML describes what the information is. Contrast this with HTML which describes how to display the information.

Put another way, HTML focuses on the layout and presentation of text, images, audio and video on a Web page; XML provides information about the meaning of the text and other data content. To define how this data is presented on a Web page, XML styles use the extensible style language (XSL). XSL can also be used to translate XML content into WML for wireless devices.

XML offers powerful flexibility for defining tags that describe the structure and nature of all types of information. With XML, tags can be developed on the fly to integrate unstructured data sources (text documents, reports, email, graphics, images, audio and video) with the structured data resources in relational or legacy databases. By creating tags that represent tables and columns (or entities and attributes) in a relational database structure, legacy data can be directly accessed from Web pages.

XHTML-the next generation of HTML-enables XML tags to be displayed as HTML in a standard Web browser. XHTML works from both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape browsers.

Why is XML Important?
The biggest win of XML is open information integration. XML uses metadata to integrate unstructured data in legacy files or databases with data in relational databases. This integration has been difficult to achieve in the past without first redeveloping the legacy systems. However, XML offers an open architecture interface that enables this integration to be achieved more easily-without the enormous efforts of the past.

By facilitating rich information exchange among machines, XML also overcomes one of the major stumbling blocks to B2B e-commerce. Currently, true information integration is not possible because the programs in each enterprise system use different terms to refer to the same data. Because these systems do not use the same terminology, finding relevant information is a challenge often worthy of a thesaurus. For example, a "customer" in accounting systems may be referred to as a "client" or "prospect" in a sales system. These systems cannot share information without a common interchange format. XML provides this format -enabling companies to define content using metadata so that people, systems, and programs use the same terminology. With XML as the integration interface, enterprises can communicate with each other's legacy systems.

Best of all, XML is simple to use. Since we don't have to worry about the presentation of the information, we can focus on defining the data. Documents can be created with XML: such documents contain the text and structure of the document, but leave formatting out. The same document can then be formatted using a style-sheet for any number of different viewing and printing devices. Because XML users create the data definitions themselves, the definitions describe the data perfectly. Supporting complex semantics simply requires nesting additional fields to describe the data.

EIPs and XML-A Powerful Combination

Although Enterprise Information Portals (EIPs) provide a central point of access to all enterprise information, over 90% of enterprise information resides in unstructured data. This data is difficult to search because it is not defined like data in relational databases and other structured data sources.

EIPs using Extensible Markup Language (XML) enable more accurate searches across all information-structured and unstructured-while ensuring security for sensitive data. XML makes it easier for EIPs to offer a single point of access to structured and unstructured data so that corporate decision-makers can find the precise information they need, and then analyze it-no matter where the information resides, or what format it takes. With XML, EIPs can more easily integrate data sources from the Internet, unstructured data in emails and other documents in the enterprise, and structured information made available through data warehouses and data marts.

When considering beyond-the-enterprise operations, EIPs and XML offer further advantage. By creating a common language, XML enables the precise communication that makes open information integration possible. EIPs can capitalize on this information integration by providing a business-to-business portal: helping companies securely share vital information across corporate boundaries.

Distinguishing between vendor XML implementations
Many EIP vendors claim to support XML, but how do you know that they provide the kind of XML support you really need? Of primary importance, look for an EIP implementation that prevents performance pitfalls from XML data type definitions. Because XML is so flexible, it can potentially cause performance issues because it does not prevent definitions that cause repeating groups or huge data structures to be loaded to Web pages. Therefore, EIP solutions must promote a data organization that is suitable for the Web, as well as enforce XML rules and recognize bad data. Document Type Definitions (DTDs)-essentially vocabulary and grammar for XML-and XML parsers should be used to ensure information integrity in XML documents.

While XML is a promising standard, look for an EIP with a flexible architecture that can secure and deliver a wide variety of data types and sources-in addition to XML. An open architecture saves companies from having to translate all data streams and output formats to support XML. And EIPs that openly distribute all unstructured and structured data-as well as embrace specialized tools that provide XML support-allow companies to integrate new Web-based initiatives with their existing information infrastructures.

Finally, an EIP solution should be standards-based and support ongoing XML standardization. The OMG has defined a set of XML tags called the XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) that standardizes the structure of data about data, or metadata. This standard lays the groundwork for communicating data structures between enterprise systems using CASE tools.

Brio Technology offers a flexible, open strategy that embraces XML. Brio.Portal's open architecture integrates unstructured and structured data sources using XML. By enabling users to define metadata types and assign keywords to objects, Brio.Report provides greater object classification-resulting in more precise query results. To help companies ramp up on this new standard, Brio.Report outputs in XHTML format, and can include XML documents in its report generation. While separate components, Brio.Portal and Brio.Report integrate seamlessly. Brio Technology works closely with the OMG to develop XML standards that will make e-business easier.

Preparing for XML
XML is still a new technology with EIPs offering sophisticated solutions this year. To prepare for XML, enterprises must do some work to transform and cleanse data for e-business interactions. Of primary importance, it's important to develop dynamic standardization schemes for handling unstructured data that is not yet XML-enabled; for example, live text feeds or PowerPoint presentations. It is also important to develop definitions for unstructured data-perhaps based on patterns, data types, or rule-based parsing logic.

Because very little data is currently available in XML, enterprises that want to leverage this new technology need to translate their current enterprise data to XML. Products are coming to market to help enterprises with this labor-intensive task. For example, Brio.Report-Brio's high-volume, high-performance enterprise reporting solution-serves as the exchange tool for translating enterprise data into XML so companies can deliver their valuable content through the enterprise portal.

Summary
XML offers numerous advantages to EIPs and enterprises with its potential for open information integration. As the enterprise portal, an EIP should be open to universally deliver all dynamic enterprise data, and supporting XML is a great way to simplify information integration.