View From The Top: Northern Light

The leading management consulting firm Bain & Company recently conducted a survey among large corporations to determine satisfaction levels with 25 enterprise applications. Knowledge Management ranked near the bottom of the list, in 21st place. What is the problem here? The companies in the survey had dropped $1MM plus on combinations of search engines, content management systems, knowledge management systems, and collaboration solutions only to see minimal value-add. The root cause of such poor regard of KM solutions is not the technology, but organizational issues like the lack of an overall content strategy, not relating content and knowledge to specific job tasks, not creating the right content aggregation processes, and poor taxonomies. The report by Bain concluded: A tool will improve results only to the extent that it helps discover unmet customer needs, helps build distinctive capabilities and helps exploit the vulnerabilities of competitors—or a combination of all three.

Northern Light supplies market intelligence/research KM solutions that deliver these three benefits to the largest enterprises in the world through a product we call SinglePoint™. In a recent internal survey, one of our enterprise customers found that 9 out of 10 of its employees ranked SinglePoint as contributing positively to their ability to do their jobs. Northern Light SinglePoint is a customized turnkey solution in which we do the entire job for our client - everything from creating the content aggregation process, supplying the taxonomies, operating the search technology, designing the UI, and populating editorial sections of the portal.

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Northern Light
One Broadway, 14th Floor,
Cambridge, MA 02142

Phone: 617-242-5960
Web: www.northernlight.com
David Seuss CEO

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