KMWorld Award winners

In 2001, we launched the KMWorld Awards as a way to bring greater visibility to the broad arena of knowledge management, and in the ensuing five years we've seen ever-increasing accomplishments both in technology and implementations.

As mentioned last month, we received more that 120 submissions for this year's Promise and Reality awards, from which our team of judges--including colleagues, analysts and (sometimes competitive) vendors--identified 20 finalists.

KM Reality

In this category we honor an organization that demonstrates leadership in the implementation of knowledge management practices and processes by realizing measurable benefits. The program had to be in place for a minimum of two years, demonstrate senior management support and have defined metrics to evaluate the program and its impact on organizational goals. In years past, we've recognized customers that have implemented a solution, but this time around we acknowledged a vendor for its internal knowledge management program, because in this particular case it has resulted in significant benefits to all its customers. This year's winner is IBM.

IBM creates complete business solutions that integrate hardware, software and services and, hence, requires true enterprisewide knowledge exchange and collaboration. The company's KM initiatives were developed to emphasize and facilitate knowledge exchange within its various business units and to promote reuse of assets. Further, the past few years have seen that emphasis exchange knowledge across the various business units to provide integrated solutions for its customers and clients, focusing on:

• asset management,
• expertise location,
• collaboration, and
• on-demand learning.

You can learn the full scope of IBM's knowledge management program by visiting our Web site, where you can review its nomination in full. While you're at it, spend some time on our completely redesigned site. It's still a work in progress, so we appreciate your input because, after all, KMWorld.com is for our readers.

KM Promise

For KM Promise, we recognize a company that delivers truly innovative technology solutions for implementing and integrating KM practices into the business process. This category is especially hard because of the extremely high quality of nearly all the submissions and also because here is where all our judges' personal biases can sneak in--we all have preferences and idiosyncrasies about various technologies. What made ZyLAB stand out was its ability to digitally file and manage electronic and paper files, especially important in this era of compliance. None of the other submissions embraced paper with the same degree of robustness.

ZyLAB recognized early on that large-scale regulations supporting national security measures, corporate governance and anti-fraud would dramatically affect information archiving and management. As a result, it made significant investments in technology to convert e-mail to XML and make e-mail files searchable in more than 200 languages. Since 2000, that search technology has been extended with text mining and other linguistic technology, making ZyIMAGE very well suited to searching large collections of paper, e-mail and electronic files.

So, to address the growing drumbeat, ZyLAB invested heavily in developing records management solutions that are compliant with DoD 5015.2 PRO-TNA (U.K.) and ISO standards, as well as document management solutions that are FDA and FAA compliant. The company further developed additional workflow and e-discovery functionality that seamlessly integrates with ZyIMAGE search technology. ZyLAB now offers a strong combination of content/records/document management and search technology. The company's offerings also support several off-the-shelf applications for users that must ensure regulatory compliance within specialized market segments.

Again, please visit KMWorld to read more about ZyLAB, IBM and the other finalists. The KMWorld Promise and Reality Awards were presented at the KMWorld & Intranets 2005 Conference and Exposition in November in San Jose.