Biographical Information

Articles by Andy Moore

E-Discovery—The New Lean-In Moment

What I REALLY know about e-discovery you could push through a Cheerio without hitting the sides. I've dabbled enough to understand that I don't know much. Legal discovery—as much as I love it as a pet topic—is a black art. It's one of those things like tuning drums. I wish I knew how, but it's truly a thing of mystery…

BPM and Case Management

BPM and Case Management? Evolution or Revolution? I've been giving this "BPM vs. case management" thing a lot of thought lately. (I know, get a life.) All the time I read that "case management" evolved from BPM. And it's just another evolutionary step along the path to complete information enlightenment. I've been as guilty as anyone in trying to connect the dots along some kind of "evolutionary scale," like those posters of early man changing to modern man.

Like almost everyone else, I allowed myself to simplify it so much that the "workflow begat BPM begat case management" common perception seemed plausible to me.

That's before I gave it all that thought I talked about a minute ago. Now I can tell you that the evolutionary arc in popular opinion is rubbish…

KM is the New Black

Knowledge management—KM—has known plenty of ups and downs. Long maligned as an expensive, unworkable, unfundable and user-unfriendly fad, it probably deserved much of that bad rep. Not all of it, but some. You don't have to be burned twice to keep your hand off the grill. Well, guess what? KM is now on an upswing…

The Wild, Wild Web

The wild, wild Web has become a messy place indeed. Rather than compiling and organizing all the known knowledge of the human species (which it promised), it has managed to disambiguate most of it into fragmented and unassociated masses of disassociated content. It's kind of disappointing. But many efforts are underway to simplify and de-clutter the repositories that have been recently built, some quite randomly and sometimes accidentally…

The Morphing of Information Governance

Information governance is coming to life as a serious and far-reaching business activity. As we'll learn during the following conversations, governance has morphed into a defensive as well as a proactive force, supported by upper management and respected by the line of business and the more legal-minded members of the organization . . . .

The Heady Trip of Customer Experience

The customer experience has adapted (and has been adopted) into many variations. It's hard to imagine any organization which hasn't at least explored how to serve its customers better, or else they're stupid. There are simply too many alternatives and too many channels for today's smart consumer to just…walk…away . . . .

Grasping For The Cloud

The cloud is gathering. There have been several baby steps leading up to now. ASPs (application service providers) opened the door to off-site, provided service that allowed organizations to off-board certain IT functions to a data center somewhere off site. Typically, the organization owned the licenses for the applications; the data center simply stored and maintained them and provided a grade-of-service that was usually negotiated in advance . . . .

Trending with SharePoint: The Value of Change

Here's the thing: The bad news about the cloud is that anyone has access to information, from anywhere, 24 hours a day. The good news about the cloud is that anyone has access to information, from anywhere, 24 hours a day. Which brings us to this month's topic: SharePoint. I'm aware that SharePoint isn't necessarily a "cloud" solution (more on that later), but it has become associated with cloud storage and applications . . . .

It’s Not Your Grandad’s BPM Anymore

Enterprise content management has gotten really complicated. No longer simply a way to send one document to the next person and the next person, ECM is now the central motor driving business processes. And to make it MORE complicated, a new kid on the block, case management, (or "adaptive case management," if you must) has entered the scene and created a new venue for content managers to moderate business problems . . . .

How To Make Big Data Headache Go Away

Let's start with the good news: Your big data problem is getting smaller every day.

The emergence of big data analysis has been described in many ways, from the ridiculous to the sublime. In some quarters, it's derided as the next buzzword, a vendor-driven fad that is designed to simply sell more software. Others consider it the defining shift in information management that leaps the chasm and brings data into the useful domain of business and government.

Me? I think it's a little of both . . . .

Making E-Discovery the New Deal

There's no way around it: Legal e-discovery is a 21st century, first-world problem. I'm pretty sure there's no one in a village in sub-Saharan Africa wondering if they are adequately protected from civil litigation. It's only a reality in today's multi-faceted, multinational and multi-problematic business world.

Which is still a pretty big deal . . . .

Brace Yourself-Another Game Changer

Every once in a while people ask me: "Aren't you a musician?" I always say, "No, I'm not a musician. I'm a drummer. I ‘hang out' with musicians." Musicians read charts. They know what a key is. They know chord progressions. Drummers, alternately, bang the hell out of stuff. I admit I try to be a "musical" drummer, but that's largely rubbish. I listen to the song, I play it. The end . . . .

"Let ‘Em Loose": The Case for a Mobile Workforce

A mobile workforce changes the game in many ways. For one, having workers absent from their desks diminishes the interaction with colleagues—the water fountain/coffee room klatches—that can lead to helpful solutions and emerging insights. That kind of camaraderie should not be taken lightly. Mobile workers also need a very different infrastructure. There needs to be a means of supporting those who work from their cars, or their homes or from the beach for that matter. . . .

KM is Writing Itself a New Lease On Life

Knowledge management has gone through many periods of reassessment: disappointment, rejection and comebacks worthy of Robert Downey, Jr. Once touted as the transformational strategy for the future, actual successes were hard to locate. Technology solutions were insufficient (and many times poorly planned). Solutions were expensive and focused on somewhat tangential things like document management or workflow. That was ill-conceived. So KM went through a well-documented period of rejection and abandonment. . . .

Governing Governance: Controlling the Sometimes-Uncontrollable

I often think of "information governance" as one of those non sequiturs that George Carlin liked, such as "military intelligence," and "jumbo shrimp." It's very difficult to have it both ways. Either you have information as a messy, unmanageable and often unruly mass of mess, or you clamp down and deny the information to emerge to help you. There are very few companies that have it both ways. But there's no questioning the fact that information governance is entirely vogue right now. . . .

Putting the Customer First

You've heard it a thousand times, in bombastic, overly emphatic tones: "Customer is King!" "Content is King!" "Cash is King!" You can't swing a dead cat in here without hitting a king. But the "customer" one may have some legitimacy. That's why we chose to focus this paper on the "the customer experience," because… well, let's face it—we wouldn't get very far without them. We've also been taught that creating a great customer experience is different and apart from "customer relationship management." I guess I buy that, but I suspect it's more brochure-speak than anything. . . .

Seeing the Cloud on the Horizon is Easy

The "cloud" is one of those overnight sensations that took years in the making. Although it seems as though cloud computing sprung into being overnight, the fact is, cloud has been developing in its slow, deliberate way for years. First, there were off-site storage providers that served as sort-of benevolent partners. "Can't afford to store it? Let us handle it." Like the self-storage garages that now dot the country's highways and byways. . . .

The Full Circle of Information Governance
Warren Lederer, VP Solutions
and Chief Relationship Officer
EDM Americas

Very often I find business leaders to be single-purposed and unwilling to "leave it at the office." Warren Lederer, VP Solutions and Chief Relationship Officer at EDM Americas, is a different sort of cat....

Governance From the Ground Up
Eddie Sheehy | CEO, Nuix

Eddie Sheehy, who has been CEO of Nuix since 2006, was a little leery of this "Meet The Leaders" thing at first. "I don't think people want to read poetry about me. I think they want to read about information governance."

The Many Dimensions of SharePoint

Bruce Springsteen said "Music is what makes us not be stupid." I'm probably overstretching the metaphor, but there's a correlation to SharePoint in there, too.

The thing about SharePoint is that it is everything at the same time. And sometimes nothing at the same time. And by that I am not trying to be critical, I'm just saying that the platform is not as complete as you'd hope it to be. . . .

Making More Sense of Enterprise Search

Fernando Lucini, CTO, of HP Autonomy is an interesting guy. Born to Spanish parents, he grew up… everywhere. His parents worked for IBM, so he spent summers in White Plains, NY. He now lives in Cambridge ("the one in the UK…the real one," he says.) So he's been surrounded by technology and academia forever. We had a chat a few days ago, ostensibly focused on enterprise search and information discovery. It was mostly that, but we veered off course a couple times. Despite his title, he insists he's not a "code writing dude." He describes himself as a leader of the technical group and a "customer guy". . . .

Exploring the New ECM

We've addressed enterprise content management many times and many ways in these pages. But it's amazing to me how there's always something new to say. I put together a little panel to tell me about what's new and different in the ECM marketspace. Joining me were Theresa Kollath, VP of information management for ASG; Kimberly Edwards, product marketing manager (focused on customer experience management, she tells me) for OpenText; and Liz Kofsky, ECM product marketing director, also for OpenText. . . .

When the "Voice of the Customer" is Actually the Voice of the Customer

The subject of big data is burning up the airwaves. What is it? How do you define it? Why is it different than business intelligence? What value does it bring? These are all valid questions. But when it comes to big data, perhaps the most important question is, "How do I analyze all this stuff?". . . .

Unlocking the Value of Information:
The Move from Content Management to Intelligently Managing All Enterprise Information—
A talk with David Mennie, Director of Product Marketing, EMC

David Mennie wasn't always the product marketing manager for EMC's Information Intelligence Group. Before that he (like me) was in the telecom industry, and he (unlike me) earned a masters degree in electrical engineering. So he brings to the marketing job an additional level of competence and knowledge.

E-Discovery and the Cloud

Greg Arnette, founder and CTO of Sonian, strikes me as a serious and studious guy, who understands the deep implications of his business. I like that. His business, just so you know, is creating the technology and infrastructure that supports e-discovery, especially in the cloud. He's deeply into the cloud.

The forces of change for Greg include the impact of cloud computing, the exponential amount of data creation, and the degree to which it is a new burden on IT to wrangle it all....

Making the Case for Case

There's been a nearly invisible shift in the business process business, but it is having an enormous impact. Business process management (BPM) is a deeply ingrained support mechanism behind almost every transaction in every organization. . . .

We Live In A Multichannel World

Have you heard the voice of your customer? Probably not, entirely.

It's not your fault. It's because the world has become so damn complicated. Remember when your customers could reach your business through one-to-one channels such as mail, the phone or in person? Forget that.

I just watched a popular news channel that spent 20 minutes—I swear—reading tweets about the news report they had just broadcasted 20 minutes before. Instant feedback. Instant reply. That's also what business communication has become.

The thing is: Where is it? Can your marcom group locate the disgruntled customer who posted a terrible critique of your company an hour ago? Can you round up the (hopefully) many folks who praised the latest release of your bla bla software? . . .

A Head in the Cloud
Steven Murphy, CEO, Metalogix

It's the Cloud, Not the Wild West

I'm not trying to exaggerate, but I've been around a while. I've seen technology trends come and go. I go back to the early days of telecom interconnect and the first development of LANs. Then I got into document capture stuff, and then content management. And my experience has been that tech trends burn hot and burn fast. So when this "cloud" thing emerged, I felt a familiar tug... "Sounds like a new thing. Might be good to jump in. And be ready to jump out, when necessary." My recent experience has taught me that there are no reliable annuities in my business. Everything changes in a heartbeat. When we set out to explore "cloud solutions and strategies," I knew that there was an alarm clock ticking. It was only a matter of time and....

Social Business: Delivering the Promise of KM?

As we all know, KM has been an uphill sell for a long time. Failed projects. Misdirected strategies. Lack of adoption. Expensive and ineffective technologies. These are the kinds of things that put a bad taste in the mouth of executives and investors.What KM really needed was a killer app—a no-brainer, value-creating, business-improving reason to adopt and support a knowledge-based strategy in the fast-moving and diverse organizations that are common today.We might have stumbled onto it. In shorthand, we call it "social business." More drawn out, it is the application of social technologies as they are applied to operational and mission-critical business functions. More on that later. . . .

It Don't Come Easy
Sid Banerjee | CEO and Co-Founder, Clarabridge

The Customer Experience: Making the Customer King
Seth Earley | CEO and Founder, Earley and Associates Earley and Associates

Information Governance: Who's In Charge?

"Information governance" has become front-of-mind for many people who are involved in information management. I know because I get the press releases.Just kidding. Partly. It's true that, as is often the case, trends in information management can be "vendor-driven" as they say in the comic books. Meaning, "we want to sell you something, and we're calling it (blank)." But this growing emphasis on governance got me wondering what the driving forces really are, and whether there's anything more than a simply hype cycle behind it.So I convened a good old-fashioned roundtable-style conference call recently. . . .

Making SharePoint the Tip of the Arrow

"If the business says ‘go,' you go. You figure out ways to make it happen." That's Mary Leigh Mackie, director of product marketing at AvePoint. She is underscoring the current trending in the world of Microsoft's SharePoint platform, particularly (but not exclusively) as it applies to content management. Her point: If it has to work, you make it work. She is referring to the customization capabilities of the ubiquitous platform, which is currently deployed in just about every business, in one form or another, that you can shake a stick at. . . .

Making the Case for Knowledge in Customer Service

Nowhere in your organizations can information be transformed into useful and actionable knowledge more gracefully and effectively than in your customer care (customer service, customer experience... whatever you want to call it) departments. For there resides the intersection between what you know, and what your customers want to know. But nobody says it's easy, and it's only getting harder. The three-way collision of Web self-service and social networking smashing into a reduced IT workforce and budget has done a number of whammys on KM in customer service. . . .

You Don't Know What You Don't Know
Bassam Zarkout, CTO, RSD

It's More Than Governance. It's Value
Deidre Paknad | VP of Information Lifecycle Governance Solutions, IBM

The Purpose-Driven Search Life

"Writing about enterprise search is not the cakewalk it used to be. With customers demanding more business value, and vendors responding by becoming more "purpose-driven" and specialized, the search market has fragmented into a series of business applications that only opaquely rely on "the search engine" to accomplish their tasks. I often call it "the technology arc." At first, all you have to do is say "enterprise search," and you have the attention of the users and the investors. Then after a while, you have to ask, "What can this new technology do for me?" Then after a while and the shine off the lily (or however that expression goes), you need to ask, "Where is the business process improvement..."

A Conversation with ...
Derek Murphy, CTO, Perceptive Search
An Enterprise Philosophy; A Logical Approach

The Strange and Wonderful Landscape of SharePoint

SharePoint: You either love to hate it or hate to love it. There are few—to no—software products that have ever inspired the kind of passionate discourse that the ubiquitous Microsoft platform has invoked. It's like religion and politics and sex all rolled up into one. Actually, come to think of it... well, never mind. Despite the fact that something near 80% of all companies have some appearance of SharePoint in their organizations, it is far from a satisfactory relationship. AIIM, in its great "Digital Landfills" survey series ("Big Data-Extracting Value From Your Digital Landfills"), notes that 26% of users said that management of unstructured content in their organizations is "somewhat chaotic." . . .

The Progressive Data Miner
Dr. Tianyi (TJ) Jiang, co-CEO, AvePoint

At KMWorld, we believe that great solutions providers do not simply appear out of thin air. There is always a driving force, a personality and a vision that stand behind every successful vendor. The leadership that allows companies to innovate and create great solutions is the key element in establishing and maintaining excellence...

Where People Count More
Michael Morrison, President and CEO, Datawatch

A lot of CEOs, when asked about the key attributes of their success, will try to bamboozle you with platitudes such as "vision" and "leadership." Michael Morrison has a different answer...

Living on the Sharpest Edge Of The Cloud

"It's been a busy month for me. I'm not complaining, mind you, but we've been adding some new projects around here—new print projects such as the "Meet The Leaders" series and new live roundtable Web events. Because of the lead times, they overlap and, frankly, get a little confused sometimes. An upcoming webinar on customer service feels a lot like the next white paper on knowledge management. And I'm not organized enough to compartmentalize these things, so I am in constant danger. . . ."

Who's NOW In Charge of Information?

The balance—and I could call it tension—between the corporate legal counsel department and their IT/technology counterparts has never been greater. Nor has the need for cooperation between them ever been greater. That was my opening gambit in this month's KMWorld White Paper opening article. It is not unknown to me that the role of IT versus ("versus" seems a little strong, but I'll get to that in a minute) the legal side of the house has ratcheted up a few notches in recent years. In past years (all of five years ago) it was IT's job to collect and "high-level analyze" (meaning "sort") the various documents, email, financial content, etc. . . .

Moving Along from BPM to Case Management

I make a salmon dish my family likes. It's very simple, but it has certain elements that make it seem fancier than it is. We had guests over once, and served it. Like any polite dinner guest, our friends asked for the recipe. I found myself saying, "It's not so much a recipe as a process." I couldn't believe my own words. I guess I was already pondering this White Paper and how I could possibly contribute to it. But it made me think. Bear with me for a minute while I torture a metaphor to within an inch of its life: Making this dish doesn't involve any rules or measurements. It is pretty much the same every time, though, because it has so few moving parts. You do this: Slice a few potatoes very thinly. Overlap them so they're sort of like fish scales—we call them "fans"—on a cast-iron griddle in segments that approximate the size of your salmon fillets. Begin to fry them. Slice shallots and place on top of the potatoes. . . .

Are You Experienced?

"When we first planned this white paper on Web experience management we were talking mainly to ourselves. There weren't too many people who regularly referred to WEM in any formalized way... and there still aren't. That will change. Pioneers are crossing the chasm. What is driving this movement? As companies realize their customer contact is becoming a "name that channel" game, they realize that a satisfactory-make that superior-Web presence is critical to gaining and retaining customers. And that goes for partner relationships, too. That's what we begin to explore with this white paper..."

What's Behind That Cloud?

This is the introductory article to the KMWorld White Paper entitled "New Solutions in Cloud Computing". Follow this link to read the rest of the White Paper.

"I'm starting to learn that my cloud and your cloud are different things. We all tend to interpret the computing "cloud" in our own ways, because in reality it's an amorphous mélange of off-site applications, private clouds, social media, mobile devices and hosted services. Whatever it is... it's not the same to everyone. I wanted to get to the heart of the cloud. So I sought out two of the smartest people I know who can address cloud computing or off-premises applications or whatever you want to call it. . . ."

A CONVERSATION WITH ... JIM DAVIS, SAS
What's Different Now?

KM is Back, Baby

"If I had to issue a forecast for the future of knowledge management—and I guess maybe I do—I would say we're in the early stages of a warming trend. And unlike global warming, the outlook is bright and encouraging. At least that's what Carla O'Dell and Chris Musico think. Carla is well known as the leader of the APQC. Chris is the director of global communications for AvePoint, a very active part of the much-discussed "SharePoint ecosystem. . . ."

Governing Governance: Not An Easy Thing To Do

""Information governance" is all over the news. It's a relatively new and buzzy discipline, but trending fast toward general acceptance. I like when that happens, but it's not an area in which I am tremendously well-versed. So when I caught this assignment, I sought out the best person I could think of to have a chat. Tamir Sigal is the senior marketing professional at RSD. He's also a friendly and talkative dude, and has become a friend. And on top of all that, he also has some strong opinions regarding the state of the art in information governance, and more..."

A Stroll Down SharePoint Lane

SharePoint has emerged as the most successful and ubiquitous software tool ofour lifetimes. However, it still isn't everything it needs to be. A SharePoint "ecosystem" has evolved to make sure that your SharePoint deployment is as effective and productive as it can possibly be. Can SharePoint be a risk to your company? Yes. Can SharePoint also be an incredible cost-sink for your IT department? Yes. Can SharePoint also be the greatest collaboration, content management and productivity tool on the planet? . . .

Where Knowledge Matters Most

Customer service, is, quite possibly, the final triumph for knowledge management. What better application in an organization can lead to increased sales, customer retention, employee satisfaction and enhanced word-of-mouth "reputation" than the customer care experience? So when we talk about "knowledge-centered support," we're talking about more than just a motto on the wall. We mean business. Here's why customer service has become the landing zone for knowledge management, and why organizations need to focus on agents, their needs, their incentives and their ultimate goals.

What Are You Looking For? An Overture to "Intelligent Search"

"Seek and ye shall find..." Yeah, right. Maybe about half the time, if you're lucky. A recent MindMetre research report surveyed approximately 2,000 business directors and managers from all over the world. Their key conclusion? More than half (52%) said they "cannot find the information they are seeking using their own organization's enterprise search facility," within a reasonable amount of time.

SharePoint, I Love You

That conquering sound you hear is SharePoint, and it is nothing short of apocalyptic. The fastest growing business application in Microsoft history (making it pretty much everyone's history), 20,000 SharePoint users have been added every day for the last five years. That's kind of astonishing.

It's A Social World: And We All Live In It

Anyone who has read these articles regularly knows that I came to "social networking" for business late and then only reluctantly. In fact, I am personally living only on the furthest outskirts of the social neighborhood. I don't Twitter, nor Tweet. I haven't linked up with LinkedIn. I have no interest in Pinterest. I'm too anti-social to collaborate. I can't even say "wiki" without smirking. I do enjoy Facebook, but mainly as a way to reconnect with old friends, remote friends and new acquaintances I never would have known otherwise. But it's also a localized, interpersonal thing in real life. I think of Facebook as a sort of secret handshake....

Intelligent Search: What Are You Looking For?

"Seek and ye shall find..." Yeah, right. Maybe about half the time, if you're lucky. It's true that most searches end in failure. And what's even more troubling is that the person making the search may never know that it was a failure. Let's say: A hypothetical knowledge worker enters a search query. May be a good one; may be a vague one. Doesn't (and shouldn't) matter. Then that person gets a results page. There is a long list of possible answers to his query, and there might even be some interesting stuff on it.
But the nagging doubt comes from "not knowing what you don't know"...

SharePoint, I Love You

That conquering sound you hear is SharePoint, and it is nothing short of apocalyptic. You'll see it mentioned elsewhere a couple times in this White Paper: The fastest growing business application in Microsoft history. . .

Enterprise Content Management: Are You Content With Your Content?

We've been talking about enterprise content management (ECM) well over 10 years now. The basic concept hasn't changed much: that the information assets of an organization should be made readily available to everyone. . . .

Hide or Seek: How to Play the E-Discovery Game

I approach the monthly pleasure of writing these articles with an exotic blend of awe and dread. Dread, due mostly to the fear that I cannot possibly find anything worthwhile to say to you readers that can measurably improve your (a.) life; (b.) job or (c.) hairstyle. (I made that last one up; there always has to be three things. Just ask Rick Perry.) The awe factor usually comes when I find out about halfway through that I am utterly wrong...

The Whole Earth BPM Catalog

There are business processes, and then there are processes that mean business. Not all work activities are created equal.

Take me, for example. A work process for me is: Decide to write an article; worry about it; pace the floor, fret, stew and finally get it done at the last minute. Most of the time. Doesn't sound like much of a "process," does it? You'd think that after 30-odd years of doing this, it would get easier. Nope. But I try to keep in mind the advice my friend David Weinberger gave me once: "Crappiness is hard to detect, but lateness is apparent immediately" . . . .

2011 KMWorld Promise and Reality award winners
Celebrating the best in innovation and service

DAM Roundup

KM and Collaboration Roundup

SharePoint: The Ultimate Game Changer

My trip up the learning curve for SharePoint is practically Sisyphean. Every time I think I've got my head wrapped around it, I find out... not quite, buster. Not the using of SharePoint—that's easy as pie. It's everything else that my former boss would have called "the surround stuff". . . .

ECM Roundup

A Conversation with ... Mike Vertal, Rivet Logic
The Content Balancing Act

Document: The Knowledge Vessel

Anyone who reads this magazine, attends our webinars or downloads these white papers already knows this: knowledge management is not an easy thing to define. You can't hit me hard enough with a stick to make me use the "elephant and the blind men" story again, but it's true. One person insists it's about the collaboration among people working in a "project space." Another talks about water coolers and prairie dogs (I'll explain later). . . .

Piling On: How Information Governance Rules the World

I hear it all the time: "Our information is out of control! We are flooded by unmanaged content! We are overwhelmed by the overloads of data washing over us!!" And I don't get it. There is PLENTY of information management... heck, you can't swing a dead cat in most businesses without hitting some kind of information management system. . . .

KM for Customer Service: Whose Truth is Worth More?

There are so many channels for customers to reach us, and so many ways in which to interact, that it is unclear whether the "contact center" or the "Web group" or the "marketing department" or the "salesforce" is in charge. Guess what. They all are, at any given point in the day or night. And each of these organizational groups has its own motives, its own directives and its own metrics for success. . . .

Social Networking: Open for Business

As anyone who reads these articles regularly knows, I came late to the party when it comes to business social networking. Or social business. Or social networking for business. (We really need to standardize on a term for it.) I can remember writing in these very pages that I thought, in so many words, that social software was too lightweight for serious business application, and was potentially a losing proposition. . . .

KMWorld Hall of Fame 2011: The Trendsetters

In Search of Search: Separating the "What" from the "Why"

There was a while there when people talked about enterprise search as though it were a "thing" that could be wrapped up and packaged and flicked on like a light switch. All we (here at KMWorld) had to do was slap the words "Enterprise Search" in the title of a webinar or a white paper, and people would flock to it. I actually saw people at a KMWorld conference with black magic markers. . .

The New Rosetta Stone
Finding Unity in the Content Experience

The SharePoint Phenom
Exploring the Services Platform of the Century

In the interest of full disclosure, I need to tell you straight up that what I know about SharePoint could fall through a Cheerio without touching the sides. Luckily for all of us, I have a pretty good Rolodex. So I called up four of the best advisors a boy could have. . . .

An Entirely New View of ECM
It’s about Discipline and Practice; Not Technology

We've been talking forever about enterprise content management (ECM) as though it was some kind of object, a thing that you could acquire and install and then it would purr like a hemi. We talked about ECM as though it were a thing that came boxed and plastic-wrapped. . . .

It’s Complicated:The Real Costs of Risk and Discovery
How E-discovery is Changing the Organization

Is anyone old enough—like me—to remember back when they told us the future was going to get easier? Robots would walk the dog and watch the kids; air cars would fly themselves. And I was supposed to have a silver jump suit by now. But if anything the rapidity of innovation and the overabundance of information have only made life harder. And nowhere is that more true than in the murky corporate world of information management. . . .

KM and Collaboration Roundup

There are many ways to slice this, but we've made an attempt to summarize a set of solutions that provide an overall view of knowledge management and collaboration tools. This is a sampler; there are many more...

Manage Email? Are You Kidding Me?

KM: The World Changer We Love To Hate
You’re Probably Already Doing It; You Just Don’t Know It Yet

I once asked a conference audience: "By a show of hands, how many of you work in organizations that have knowledge management implementations currently in place?" A smattering held up their hands… maybe three or four. "OK, now how many have, uh, content management systems in place? . . ."

ECM Roundup

Enterprise content management (ECM) is a tricky category. Many search and Web content vendors feel they provide "ECM." But in fact, true ECM—if it exists at all—demands a specific set of functionality, including secure access, version control, check-in/check-out and cross-platform access to multiple information repositories … and more. Here's a sampling of the key players in the ECM market...

What Makes You Rich Can Make You Poor
How SharePoint Has Become The Best and the Worst Thing Ever

There's a great Ry Cooder song: "The Very Thing That Makes You Rich, Makes Me Poor."1 That should be on the iPod of every IT guy who is coping with SharePoint right now. Because SharePoint has turned into the biggest "the good news is… the bad news is…" story of the decade. . .

Business Intelligence Roundup

Business intelligence (BI) tools are the technology behind your ability to analyze vast amounts of transactional data to interpret trends in business activity. They usually deliver this information in a friendly visual way—charts, graphs—often in a number of side-by-side views called "dashboards." Here's a sampling of current BI tools...

The Gamble: Risk Vs. Governance

And I quote: "Regulatory compliance is what you have to do. Information governance is what you should do. And risk avoidance is what you achieve when you do both of those correctly." That's roughly what I wrote about a year ago, and it's still pretty much true today. But a few things have changed in the records and risk-management business since then, so I set out to discover what those elements were. To do so, I spoke at length with Miguel Rodriguez. Miguel is the senior product manager for ASG Software Solutions, and is as gentlemanly and poised as they come. He's also got a sense of humor about his work, and we had a great talk a couple weeks back. "For most business-side people, their contact with the reality of technology is limited. . . .

Image, forms, document capture Roundup

The market for image capture is by no means diminished, as we learned researching this roundup. This is not even close to every company in the market, but rather a representative sampler...

At Your Service
Navigating the Complex Customer Interaction Dilemma

Managing the experience your customers have with your company is probably the most important effort you can undertake. But many companies don't really have a grasp on what—exactly—that means. How do our customers perceive us? What do they expect (or demand) from us? And after they've had an engagement with us, how do they feel? Because it's that afterglow that defines the difference between a return customer, or a disaster...

Straddling Two Worlds
Paper and Electronic Processes Are At An Impasse

It's a hoary cliché (in fact, "hoary cliché" is a hoary cliché) that the paperless office is about as likely to happen as the paperless bathroom.There are plenty of folks out there, like Theresa Kollath, director of product management for ASG, who are willing to address—and try to solve—the many challenges that businesses face when trying to overcome their dependence on thinly pressed sheets of crushed wood pulp.I spoke with Theresa at length the other day, and I'll try not to interrupt her words too often. But I probably will."More of our customers than you would think are still involved in paper. There are folks who are still creating custom communications in the process of issuing, say, a new mortgage. In that case, there is a large amount of forms, and someone has to initial the bottom of each page. Much of it is boilerplate, but things such as the exact terms and conditions, the interest rate, anything that comes to attention after a review of your credit rating. . . .

CRM Roundup

Here's a selection from the many leading customer relationship management (CRM) software and services vendors from around the globe...

Social Software Roundup

Here's a sampling of the hottest new category of technology vendors—social media, social networking, social business tools … social networking means NEW business...

Business IS Society: Get Used To It

Not surprisingly, "social networking" found almost immediate footing in the customer-facing segments of organizations. There's something uniquely "customer-servicey" about it… we talked to five vendors in the social network space—Attensity, Consona, Lucid Imagination, NewsGator and Open Text. Even though they agree that social networking will revolutionize business, they take distinctly different approaches toward the subject...

RM Roundup

“Search” Versus “Access”
Making the (Current) Case for Enterprise Search

"Enterprise search." For some reasons it's become the third rail for technology companies, pundits and users as well. We start off this month by getting into the terminology surrounding this market. I'm not entirely clear on the reason, but the analyst community has fled from the term "enterprise search..."

Search Roundup

... a sampler of some of the search-specific software and services vendors...

KMWorld reader poll “What would you do?”

E-Mail Roundup

E-mail management is a HUGE business challenge. E-mail represents nearly 100 percent of an organization's communications, and is thus at risk for litigation, confusion and waste...

It Don’t Come Easy
Why ECM is Harder Than It Looks

"Enterprise content management." It rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? At first blush, it would seem as straightforward and intuitive as any other "asset" management, like "cash management" or "property management." But content management—and to put it into even sharper focus, enterprise content management—is not nearly as clear-cut...

DM Roundup

BPM Roundup

The 1% Solution
Why Your Business is Not Prepared for E-Discovery

It may not be a strictly scientific finding, but nobody argues that only about 1% of businesses are FULLY prepared for e-discovery. 1%—that's statistically zero. Sure, there are the regulated industries...

DAM Roundup

Some Things Never Change, But Some Things Do

I've been writing these opening articles ("overture essays," we call them, somewhat pretentiously) for many years now. And increasingly, when I approach the prospect of digging down into a subject we've covered before—such as this one, business process management, or BPM—there's a moment when I think: "What else can be said about this subject that hasn't already been said?" And I'm always wrong...

Expanding Web Content Management

I can't remember the first website I ever saw. But I bet if you saw it today, it would be hilarious. I don't need to tell you that comparing today's Web* to that of eight years ago is like talking about pre-Cambrian turbellarian worm fossils (don't bother looking; there aren't any). But did you ever wonder how the Web became so advanced, so quickly? I did. So I called up Larry Bowden. Larry's the vice president of the "portals and mashups" (really, no kidding) division of IBM. He's a big-deal guy, an old acquaintance, and he took time out of his busy schedule to school me about Web content management (WCM)...

Is KM a Noun or a Verb?
Making the Case for a Technology Component

There has always been a partisan divide among proponents, and critics, of know-ledge management. On one side of the aisle, there's a primarily vendor-driven insistence that "knowledge management" is the sum of a series of technologies, somehow mashed up and desktopped in such a way that the management of corporate know-how is "automated," and the result is the seamless transfer of information in all its forms among the minions that trudge through the door every morning. On the other side are the intellectual snobs who insist "knowledge cannot be managed." They'll concede that certain content management and analytics tools might smooth the pathway for "information management,"...

An Education in Records
What You Don’t Know CAN Hurt You

This year is the 400th anniversary of New Amsterdam, now more familiarly known as New York City. In 1609, Henry Hudson, an Englishman sailing for the Dutch East India Company, made the first exploration of what is now New York harbor and of the majestic river that today bears his name, laying the foundation for the Dutch claim on the area. His voyage of discovery led to the creation of the Dutch West India Company and ultimately to the founding of New Netherland, including its trading post at the mouth of the river—New Amsterdam...

A World Made Of Paper
Seems Like That Sometimes, Doesn’t It?

Paper is not sexy. First of all, it's flat—no curves! And it's thin—no muscles! Don't even get me started on the fact that it's mostly white. It doesn't even have that certain allure of danger ... unless you count paper cuts. So how come every information manager I've ever known (and I've known a lot) always tells me, "We've got to deal with this paper!" "We're overwhelmed by all this paper!" And my favorite, "We have to tame this paper beast!"The paper beast is still alive and well, after all these years. Despite almost two decades' worth of effort to automate paper-based business processes of all kinds, it might be a little surprising that the issue of "paper" is still on the minds of knowledge managers and business executives...

When Did Everyone Get So Nice?
Social Networks Deliver on the KM Promise

"I love you ... You love me ... We're best friends like friends should be..."The Barney theme song haunted me for years. My kids—like most kids—were Barney robots, and parked in front of the tube every morning to see the purple dinosaur frolic meaningfully in his carefully diverse neighborhood. And every morning, at the 28:30 minute mark, my two kids would coming running into the kitchen screaming, "Mommy! Daddy! The song! The song!" And we would dutifully drop whatever we were doing and come to the TV to sing along with them...

What You Know...and What You Don't
A Brief Foray Into Text Analytics As We Know It

Scads of words have been written about "enterprise search," "knowledge management," "information access," etc. In fact, I am responsible for a scad or two myself.And, of course, it makes sense: When 90% of the information your company possesses is in the form of unstructured text files and email, plus more-or-less formal formats (contracts, PowerPoints, legal documents and marketing material, etc.), it's painfully obvious that tools to access that content will emerge as key components of the knowledge-worker toolset.
But what HASN'T been covered quite as well are the text-mining and analytic tools that exist to find content—and the many relationships between content objects—that are not yet part of the average, daily knowledge worker's regimen.The way it's often been put is this:SEARCH is useful when you know basically what it is you're looking for. A specific email... a contract for a specific deal...

Search is Much More Than “Search”
Embedded or Not, Search is Reaching Beyond Its Roots

I went into this month's article research cycle expecting doom and gloom reports from the edge of the economic cliff. After all, when companies are laying off thousands upon thousands, and financial institutions are circling the drain...

From Service to Experience
The Evolution of the “You” and “Your Customer” Interaction

I am always a little dubious when marketers update the way in which we refer to time-honored traditions. A recent case in point would be how "search" has become "information access." Why is that an improvement? Another one that MIGHT fit the category would be "customer experience" as a euphemism for customer service. Except that I think it is not. Here's the thinking: "Customer relationship management" implies...

Man in the Middle

The Elephant in the Corner
The Subject Might Be Content, But the Conversation is Larger

Any frank discussion of business investment in this climate HAS to acknowledge the elephant in the corner: the economic crisis in the US and abroad. And sure enough, this month's discussion topic—enterprise content management (ECM)—did just that. Even though there is plenty of reluctance...

The Worst—and Best—in E-Discovery
Whether You Celebrate or Mourn is Up To You

In some ways, we were way ahead of the curve. We've been talking on these pages about the challenges of locating, retrieving, indexing and presenting electronic information in the event of litigation—also known as "e-discovery"...

Making Process the Point
Technology or Philosophy? Depends on Whom You Ask

Sixty years ago we did not have the Internet. We did not have client-server computing. We did not have mainframes, by and large (and LARGE is right!). We did not have workflow, automation or iPods, either. But we HAD business process management. Cats like Deming and Drucker were already thinking, writing and acting...

Edges Moving Toward the Center
Records and Archiving Join the Information Management Table

Once upon a time there was a records manager, who managed records. And there was an IT group, who managed archives. And there were knowledge workers, who carried out their daily jobs. And there were legal officers, who made sure all the above didn't get the company in trouble...

Social Networks Sweep the Landscape
How I Learned to Love Blogs and Wikis

We USED to have a joke around the office. Whenever one of us had a question we couldn't immediately resolve, someone would inevitably pipe up, "Hey, let's start a wiki." It was dripping with sarcasm. We are self-righteously skeptical of buzz terms, especially one as silly as that—"wiki..." I mean, come on...!

Looking for Identity in a 2.0 World

Knowledge management has always had an identity problem. With its unclear business objective and vague value proposition (for many business leaders, at least), KM has had an uphill climb to respectability for years.

An Accident of History
Financial Services Organizations Were Born Under a Bad Sign

I should be more careful about what I hope for. I've been "covering" the financial services industry in these pages for five or six years now. Every year, I've sat at this desk, and looked into the white expanse of the word processing "new blank document" screen and wondered: What the heck do I know about the financial services industry?
"Why can't it be different this year? Why can't something happen that would give me a hook...

A Conversation with ...
Jason Hekl and Nav Chakravarti, inQuira

Getting Schooled on SaaS
A Fairly Understandable Explanation of a Phenom

Dan Carmel is an enthusiastic guy. White-tent evangelist enthusiastic. We were talking—mainly HE was talking!—the other day about the latest emerging trend in, well, just about everything that a business does on a daily basis.
OK; that's a little overblown, I suppose. We were actually talking about "software as a service," or SaaS as they insist on acronyming it. (I want someone to explain that upper case/lower case thing to me someday.)
Dan is CEO of SpringCM. SpringCM could best be described as a content and document management software vendor, I guess. But there's a lot of those. Dan's company has a twist. A big twist. It specializes in delivering its customer applications over the Internet in a hosted environment...

A Conversation with ... Dr. Galina Datskovsky, CA
When Risk Isn’t Risky
The Fine Lines Between Many Rights and Many Wrongs

Risky Business
How “Avoiding Trouble” has Become “Risking Trouble”

I entered into this relatively newly amalgamated area of "governance, risk management and compliance" (inevitably acronymned "GRC") with a false understanding. I assumed that compliance was what you had to do, governance is what you should do, and risk avoidance is what you achieved if you did the first two things correctly. That, I have learned, is only sort of correct. But sort of not. Which should come as no surprise to anyone who has read these columns, nor to me. I should know better. I never get it right the first time.
Seems that whether it's managing content for business purposes, or managing regulations for compliance purposes, or even managing disaster recovery for business continuity purposes, a "risk-based approach" is all the rage...

For Better or Worse
The Control, and Release, of YOUR Information

In these days of diminishing stature for the US on the world stage, it's nice to hear we're still number one at something: "The US leads the world in terms of disclosure, largely because they legislated early and quickly following the Enron debacle, providing a new level of transparency in government."
The speaker is Glyn Williams, CEO, Onstream Systems Ltd., and as a New Zealander and international businessperson, has tacit permission to remark on the US's world stature from a relatively outsider position...

The Enterprise Search "Essay Test"

I decided to conduct my usual monthly interviews a little differently this time. I sent out a series of "essay questions," with the certain expectation...
There's more! The full transcripts of the Enterprise Search interviews can be read here.

The Enterprise Search "Essay Test"—Extended Remix

01 May 2008

There was too much good material emerging from this month's roundtable, so we've included it here. . . .

From the Highway to My Way
Tracing the Evolution of the Web Self-Service Experience

01 Apr 2008

"Dynamic and engaging." "Effective and friendly." Paige Mantel, vice president of product marketing at Interwoven, is describing the best of today's e-commerce Web experiences. But she could be describing herself. Paige is charming and knowledgeable, and has a clear historical perspective on the growth and current domination of Web-based customer service through her history with one of the early leaders in Web content management, Interwoven...

The Chaos of Content
Facing the Natural Boundaries of "Managing" vs. "Using"

27 Feb 2008

Imagine my surprise when one of the interview subjects for this month's focus on enterprise content management—and a vendor whose website includes that term fairly prominently—flatly stated: "enterprise content management is a myth..."

People Get Ready
The “New” FRCP Will Change Your Life

05 Feb 2008

I recently dove headlong into the subject of litigation readiness and the role that electronically stored information (ESI, in that world's parlance) plays in it, especially in light of the "new" (more than one-year-old now) Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

BPM Is a Verb. Workflow Was a Noun.

07 Jan 2008

I have been wondering about this trending in the BPM marketplace: the increasing emphasis on using business process management tools in a manner that's more suggestive of a predictive and strategic planning role than a workflow or process tool...

DAM: It’s Not Just For Disney Anymore

30 Oct 2007

By that headline, I do NOT mean that the media/entertainment companies are no longer interested in managing their digital assets... completely the opposite is true! And I don't mean to single out Disney... any media, entertainment, news and publishing business whose products ARE rich media—movies, video, music, Web content—still relies on very complex, very specialized digital asset management (DAM) systems to conduct its daily work...

What’s the New Face of Knowledge Management?

30 Oct 2007

Here's a shocker: There was a time when knowledge management wasn't very well accepted. The early proponents—self-described "global, big-picture" thinkers—made a critical strategic error. By overloading the significance of KM with visions of utopian "transparent organizations" and "corporate agility," they gave the reigning executives of the day the perfect exit route...

RM For The Masses

27 Sep 2007

For the world's largest, highly regulated industries—pharma, financial services, food distribution—managing business records to comply with regulatory requirements is just a day at the office. It's another Thursday; no big deal, been doing it for years. But corporate scandal, and (let's face it) predatory litigators have pushed the demand downward and outward.

The Customer is Always There!

06 Jul 2007

I need a new cliché. Because I am SO tired of the “10 blind men describing an elephant” story that I could plotz. But the problem is: it’s SO right for describing the market’s apparent conception of customer relationship management (CRM). I had a nice chat with Pete Strom the other day. Pete is general manager of Consona CRM, which is the division of the company that drives the KNOVA and Onyx products. Consona is a relatively new name for the company...

A Conversation with ... ANDY MACMILLAN, ORACLE

30 May 2007

”Search” vs. “Searching”: Bringing Enterprise Search Back to Reality

30 Apr 2007

Once upon a time, anything labeled “enterprise search” got attention. I actually saw people adding the words “enterprise search” with magic marker onto their signage at trade shows.

A Conversation with ... KEVIN DUFFY, XyEnterprise

01 Apr 2007

Smoothing the Abstraction How a Component Approach Simplifies Publishing... and Makes it Cheaper, Too!

The Motor or the Fan?: ECM Moves From Pure-Play to Every Day

28 Mar 2007

Lots of people have written about the inevitable assimilation of “technology” into “application.” The best example (thanks, Paul S.) is in the 1993 Don Norman book “The Things That Make Us Smart.” In it he talks about how, in the 1920s, you could order from the Sears-Roebuck catalog an electric motor. Then you could buy various attachments...

When is a Website Not a Website?

01 Mar 2007

I'm not certain when it happened, but sometime when I was not looking, someone stole the World Wide Web. I swear I didn't take my eyes off of it for more than a minute, but when I looked again, instead of the Web, there was a... take your pick: television station... record store... book shop... call center... sales channel...

A Conversation with ... Charlie Isaacs, KANA Covering All the Channels

01 Mar 2007

A Conversation with ... Daniel Lucarini, Captaris

01 Feb 2007

Pushing The Document Up The Value Chain

The Abstraction of BPM Maybe It’s Not That Difficult After All

01 Jan 2007

A lot of people I meet from “the real world”—at cocktail parties, kids’ sports events, community activities—have a really hard time grasping the abstraction of information management from that of what they do on a day-to-day basis.

The Readers speak-10th Anniversary KMWorld Readers' Choice Awards

01 Jan 2007

About 11 years ago, a group of us were starting to ask ourselves whether all this "information management stuff" might have a greater purpose than merely to store information in a file server somewhere. That maybe—just maybe—information could be applied to the type of work and to the level of decision-making taking place in business at such a famously accelerated pace. And in providing that information to the right person at the right time, the promise of a truly knowledge-based economy could be realized. In the 10 years since ImagingWorld became KMWorld magazine, we've tried to address the discipline (practice? theory? religion?) of knowledge management from each of its well-known constituent components—people, process, technology.

Glamour and Guts: The Two Faces of DAM

01 Nov 2006

The roots of digital asset management (somewhat distractingly and sometimes amusingly shortened to “DAM”) are firmly planted in the media/entertainment and the print/publishing marketspaces. Movie studios and newspaper conglomerates, international news agencies and advertising movers-and-shakers—these were the first types of organizations to embrace digital asset management. As a result, it should be glamorous and exotic—as Paris Hilton would say: “It’s hot.” Well, OK, I guess. I have yet to find a deep well of hotness, but I WILL say that DAM is leading the way toward a fantastic vision that goes way beyond the mere information management and content delivery that we know today. Movie studios and television production groups use DAM to manage their intellectual property and their production processes. In that sense, DAM is sort of exotic. Imagine being able to search for a certain word spoken in a movie soundtrack (“search: Rosebud”), or sort a server full of video clips by “girl,” “guy” or “horse.” It really starts to get into Star Trek territory.

Passing the Cringe Test Has Knowledge Management Made It to Prime Time?

01 Nov 2006

Once upon a time, saying the words “knowledge management” was the fastest way to get thrown out of a meeting. And not only would you be ejected, you would never be invited back.

The Compliance Imperative

01 Oct 2006

To be “compliant” can mean a dozen things. Regulated industries and government are accustomed to being regulation-driven; that’s a Thursday for them.

Why We Were All Wrong About Financial Services

01 Sep 2006

Set the scene: It’s 1995. You’re the executive officer—president—of the Hooverville First National Bank. It’s your basic hometown-type bank...about 15 branches, all in medium-size towns of, say 20,000 people; the strip-mall and housing development sort of towns. You manage about $100 million in assets. Not big, not small...Hooverville-sized. You go to the annual banker’s convention in...I don’t know...St. Louis. The keynote speaker is mesmerizing...and scary. He says: “Branch banking is over! Branch banking is dead! ATMs will rule the world! Automation will replace retail banking! The world as you know it is kaput!” And you start planning your next career as a goat-milk farmer.

Invisible in the Everyday

13 Jul 2006

I'm sitting in the press "lounge" at the AIIM show in Philadelphia, thinking about imaging. I'm somewhat sheepish to confess that I haven't thought this much about imaging since this time last year. Sitting in the press lounge. At AIIM. But that's not because imaging has diminished somehow as a viable marketplace. It hasn't. Nor should it suggest that there aren't still many opportunities for business managers to benefit from automated document capture. There are. And it should not indicate that I haven't been paying attention to imaging as a technology and a business solution. I have. It's just that imaging has—at long last—fulfilled its destiny. It has disappeared into the everyday. I used to address a lot of audiences at imaging conferences. There was a story I always told that, I thought, profoundly represented the reality of imaging versus its promise. Stop me if you've heard this...

Dissecting the Public and Private Sectors: ”Have To” vs. “Want To”

01 Jun 2006

Dissecting the Public and Private Sectors ”Have To” vs. “Want To” My question was simple: What are the main differences between the ways the public sector—government agencies, administrations, defense organizations, civilian agencies—deploys technology solutions versus the ways its private, commercial counterparts do it? My initial guess was spelled out in the title of this article: There’s “Have To,” and then there’s “Want To.” I took this basic premise into two conversations this month—one with Jan Rosi, president of TOWER Software North America, and one with Steve Papa, founder and chairman of Endeca.

Are your digital assets protected?

26 May 2006

A Conversation with ... Dan Ryan, COO, Stellent

26 Apr 2006

Finding the Center: A Records Application to Rule Them All

How Peter Met Mary Jane: The Mythology of Enterprise Content Management

26 Apr 2006

If you’ve been paying attention, you might have picked up a little bit of Spiderman mythology hovering over what we now call “enterprise content management.”

A Conversation with ... Michael Murphy, CEO, Inquira

31 Mar 2006

Making the Best of Web Self-service Understanding Language and Intent Leads to a New Age for Customer Service

In Search of Search
What Does the Marketplace See When it Looks in the Mirror?

23 Mar 2006

I usually make it a rule for these interviews: No inside baseball. I’m normally much more interested in the so-called 50,000-foot view...how customers perceive their business needs and how these various KMWorld-y technologies can address them. Or how buyers organize themselves...

Dr. Strangelove, or,
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love BI

01 Mar 2006

I've always had a nagging underappreciation for the whole business intelligence thing. I'm just not that into BI. In the first place, BI is always trailing the trend, not spotting it. BI reports are really, really good at telling you what already happened. They're kinda crappy at telling what will happen next. On top of that, they're also undemocratic. Your run-of-the-mill BI tool is like rocket science to most users, so most users don't get to play with it. So, as a result, well-meaning business managers have to go to the one guy's cubicle who knows how to work the analytical tool, and ask "May I have a report, please?" It's like that scene in Oliver. It's sort of pathetic. Worse, then, BI reports are b-o-r-i-n-g ... all squiggly-line graphs that look like yesterday's Dilbert cartoon. . . .

Email: The Good, The Bad and The Unruly

01 Feb 2006

“The only things that are certain are death, taxes and that some guy from Nigeria wants to put $10 Million US into your bank account. And if you're smart enough, you can skip the taxes part. . . .

Who’s On First?

01 Jan 2006

BPM May Have Become a Team Sport, But Who’s the Coach? Business process management (BPM) has long been the domain of the line-of-business managers who directly benefit from process automation initiatives. Stands to reason; efforts to create efficient business processes logically emerge from the groups who are commissioned to either (a.) save money; or (b.) do something better; or (c.) all the above. But that very inducement to effect change at a department-by-department pace has led to many problems for information technology (IT) staffs. And they haven’t always taken kindly to it.

Is it "KM" or Just "K": Splitting Hair in the Knowledge Age

01 Nov 2005

“Our customers believe they have a knowledge problem. They just don’t see it as a knowledge management problem.” Eric Stevens from Hummingbird has just identified the key challenge facing the entire knowledge-based economy… including both the users and the marketplace that serves them . . . .

The Power of Jointness

01 Oct 2005

“Collaboration” is one of the big knowledge management-mantra words—this is a list that also includes “sharing,” “capturing” and even “delivering” knowledge. When industry gurus talk about KM, you can bet “collaboration” isn't far behind. So how come it's so hard to write about. . . ?

Should you outsource?

01 Oct 2005

The Chilling Effect: How Records Management is Changing the Way We Work

01 Sep 2005

Not that long ago, the only “records management” I knew anything about was alphabetizing my Monkees LPs. And I am not alone. Records management (RM), once the domain of a specialized, trained population of information experts, has intruded into the mainstream with unexpected and disruptive consequences . . .

Imaging's Strange Image Problem

01 Jul 2005

What Makes Government Different?

01 Jun 2005

Enterprise Content Management: Size or Strategy?

01 May 2005

A CONVERSATION WITH...Alkis Papadopoullos, Director, Linguistic Technologies, Convera, Canada

01 May 2005

What crisis?

01 May 2005

Understanding Search: Seven Critical Questions (and answers)

01 Apr 2005

This is a summary

E-mail: Cursed Blessing or Blessed Curse?

01 Mar 2005

Financial Services Have it Tough

01 Feb 2005

Mom's Unimprovable Cherry Pie ... and Why Everything Else Needs Work

01 Jan 2005

A Conversation with...Hummingbird-The New Age for Business Intelligence: How BI is Creating Value by Escaping its Data-only Past

01 Oct 2004

Records Management: Beyond the Quick Fix

01 Sep 2004

Why the Legal Industry is Different......and why it's also the same

01 Jul 2004

The universe of search

01 Jul 2004

The Inevitable Conclusion

01 Jun 2004

The Soap Opera of the Organization

01 May 2004

Records report says: “You are at risk”

01 May 2004

Data and Content Integration: The Inflection Point for Better Business

01 Apr 2004

ECM in the Eye of the Beholder

01 Mar 2004

Under Pressure, Insurance Fights Back

01 Feb 2004

BPM: Maturing Toward a “Process Nirvana”

01 Jan 2004

Enterprise search: the Holy Grail of KM?

01 Jan 2004

The Was and Is of Knowledge Management

01 Nov 2003

Focus on Convera: A Conversation with...Dale Hazel

01 Oct 2003

Without a Net

01 Oct 2003

A Year for the Records

01 Sep 2003

A Reality Check for CRM

01 Jul 2003

For the Record

01 Jun 2003

Taking on the Organization

01 Jun 2003

Tear Down That Wall

01 May 2003

The Next Big Thing...Again

01 Apr 2003

Is There a Doctrinaire in the House?

01 Mar 2003

Left Brain; Right Brain

01 Feb 2003

The Punctuated Acceleration of Value

01 Jan 2003

Workflow: The Biggest Industry You Never Saw

01 Nov 2002

In Search of the "Amazing Truth"

01 Oct 2002

A conversation with ...Tracy Shelby: Connecting the Dots Between Workflow and Customer Service

01 Sep 2002

Supernatural, and the Zen of Collaboration

01 Jul 2002

Government: The Mirror Image of Information Management

01 Jun 2002

Peek Into the Future...From Your Desktop Today

01 May 2002

A conversation with...Raj Jaswa

01 Apr 2002

Reality Bites

01 Mar 2002

Overture Article: "Information Rich, Knowledge Poor"

02 Feb 2002

On Bob, MP3 and Business Imagination

01 Jan 2002

Shifting Toward Normalcy

01 Nov 2001

The River that Runs Through it

01 Sep 2001

Ground Zero for E-Commerce: Face-to-face with knowledge in the learning spaces

01 Sep 2001

Content, the Once and Future King, Andy Moore

01 May 2001

Lotus takes steps to unify Web with KM

27 Sep 1999

Reporting from Lotusphere '99, KMWorld editor-in-chief Andy Moore says that Lotus Domino R5 both departs from and enhances Domino's position in collaborative space.

Changing ... from the grounds up

01 Sep 1999

An environment for innovation:American Management Systems

01 Feb 1999

Exchange as work management portal

01 Nov 1998

Applying KM to customer interaction

01 Oct 1998

KM can start with E-mail

25 May 1998

Knowledge transfer series: Work management through messaging

11 May 1998

Not dead yet: workflow's bright future in customer relationship management

11 May 1998