Content and Knowledge Management

As businesses increasingly become knowledge-based, their most valuable assets become more and more intangible, instead of being physical assets, such as plant and machinery. The most valuable assets of modern companies is likely to be based on Intellectual Property such as:

• Customer relationships
• Customer knowledge
• Business process methodologies
• Niche market domain knowledge
• Software
• Patents
• Trademarks
• Copyrights
• Trade secrets
• Supplier relationships
• Certifications
• Slick systems
• Relevant experience
• Knowledge bases

Typically much of this IP is not codified or documented, it is held in employees' brains. If it is documented, it is typically held in disparate systems and documents in a very ad-hoc manner.

This is plainly not an ideal way to manage and safeguard a company's most valuable assets.

ECM systems enable an organisation to manage this information in a structured logical manner.

By adding metadata to all types of documents (including e-mail) KnowledgeWorker® brings structure to the data. This metadata can be added automatically, such as which customer the document relates to; some may be added manually, but because the categories may be defined system-wide, this is much more reliable and consistent than folders on a file share. Also folders are one dimensional, in KnowledgeWorker® there is no limit to the number of dimensions that may be used.

Consider a firm of solicitors which handles multiple types of legal work: criminal, contract, employment, property, etc.

A legal executive working on the conveyancing of a property for a customer would probably file the final contract document as follows:

Traditional File Share :
G:\Customers\Joe Bloggs\ Final Contract 123 Cardiff Rd.doc

Knowledge Worker / Knowledge Store - possible metadata tags:

Thinking about the above is it hopefully patently obvious that organising documents with metadata attached is a far more powerful method, than using a flat file structure.

In the above metadata example, it is possible for the legal firm to far more easily find, share and analyse information, as well as bring structure and value to the information so that it becomes company knowledge.

• Reduce compliance costs dramatically
• Increase compliance from <50% to >95%
• Reduce risk significantly
• Automate complex business processes
• Find information in unstructured data
• Preserve valuable company knowledge
• Share valuable company knowledge
• Collaborate more effectively
• Knit disparate systems together