2007 KMWorld Promise and Reality Award Winners

Each year, the technology and solutions nominated for these awards become increasingly sophisticated, on one hand, and increasingly intuitive on the other. Nearly gone are the days of complex and cumbersome deployments—those very factors that even a decade ago gave knowledge management a bit of a black eye. And although our panel of judges, who include colleagues, analysts, integrators and sometimes competitors, had a tough job narrowing down the award finalists, we all agreed that this year’s winners exemplify what can only be described as a new era of knowledge management, KM 2.0.

—Hugh McKellar, KMWorld editor in chief

The Criteria
 
KM PROMISE AWARD
Many companies promise that their technology is the best knowledge management solution. This award is given to the organization that is delivering on its promise to customers by providing innovative technology solutions for implementing and integrating knowledge management practices into their business processes. The award-winning organization demonstrates how it goes beyond simply delivering technology to working with clients to ensure that both the technology and knowledge processes are embedded into the work processes. In other words, it helps organizations realize positive business results.

KM REALITY AWARD
In many organizations, knowledge management is just rhetoric. This award recognizes an organization in which knowledge management is a positive reality. The recipient of the KM Reality Award is an organization demonstrating leadership in the implementation of knowledge management practices and processes by realizing measurable business benefits. The knowledge management program will have:

• been in place for a minimum of two years,
• demonstrated senior management support, and
• defined metrics to evaluate the program and its impact on organizational goals.

PROMISE
Much has been made of the Semantic Web, and while a lot of progress is being made (especially in EU countries—you can read more about that in our next issue in an article by Greg Pepus), the enterprise has a way to go before realizing the true benefit of content in instant context. That is unless large organizations happen to be relatively early adopters of Connotate’s technology, winner of the KM Promise Award.

At the core of Connotate’s technology are fully automated, machine-intelligent intelligent agents, which can do what humans can do (including learn) to monitor, mine, analyze, mash up and deliver high-value content that would otherwise be mind-numbingly time-consuming to discover. XML-enabled content is delivered over any number of media including XML, RSS, e-mail, text messaging, file systems and direct feeds to SQL databases and Excel.

As was the case with the KM Reality Award winner, the panel was quick to select Connotate above the other finalists (you can review those submissions at our conference site (click here). Make no mistake, Connotate’s Agent Community GEN2 leapfrogs "traditional" search, and content aggregation is a mere component of its capabilities. Its growing list of customers, which currently includes primarily large publishers and financial services institutions, acknowledges that Connotate truly is delivering on the promise of the enterprise Semantic Web.

REALITY
Regular readers of this publication may recall that in 2005, ZyLAB received the KM Promise Award for its end-to-end KM solution. And, for the first time in the history of the program, one of its customers has received the KM Reality Award.

The United Nations Assistance to the Khmer Rouge Trials/Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (UNAKRT/ECCC) needed to deploy an electronic document management system for all its judicial records and in support of the records of the Office of the Prosecutor and the Defense Support Unit. The document management system also had to support the administrative records of UNAKRT/ECCC and allow external lawyers and other third parties to access, review and download selected relevant evidence data via secure Internet connections.

As chief of the Records and Evidence Unit for the United Nations, Gonzalo de Cesare was in charge of evidence gathering and delivery for the Cambodian war crimes prosecutions. He explains that the entire tribunal is now paperless and deadlines can be made. In addition, evidence material cannot get lost, and disclosure to the court and third parties is easy (by CD, DVD and the Internet). Users with little to no computer experience are now scanning, reviewing evidence material and key fielding (foldering and annotating) it for disclosure sets to the court.

Clearly, de Cesare and UNAKRT/ ECCC, with the help of ZyLAB, deserve this award, and their good work continues to grow.