KMWorld Conference Wrap-Up and Look Ahead

Evident in all the tracks and conferences was the trend toward recognizing the foundational value of KM to enterprises large and small, nonprofit and for profit. Without seamless access to knowledge—access that stretches across data silos and transcends formats—enterprises cannot please customers and employees as they would like. AI-based technologies contribute to elevating the value of KM, but they are not the only driving force.

Technology to connect people and knowledge

The ability to centralize the knowledge found in the distributed tools, repositories, and databases for KM practitioners is the defining characteristic of today's technologies. Generative machine learning models not only play pivotal roles in managing that knowledge to make it meaningful to users, but also in enabling them to interface with it on-demand, for ad-hoc use cases.

KMWorld Trend-Setting Products of 2024

It's clear from the increase in new and exciting products designed for KM practitioners that KM is gaining in importance within organizations and being recognized as critical to the success of enterprises. The ability of technology to streamline information flows, summarize lengthy documents, surface hidden information from existing data, and make search results relevant and actionable gives companies a competitive advantage.

Taxonomies: Foundational to knowledge management

As the volume of digital content increases, the ability to manage it becomes more important. Taxonomy and metadata are vital to finding products, conducting scientific research, and keeping track of organizational information. They also enable a wide variety of analytics on unstructured data. We can see the results of a well-designed taxonomy, but behind the scenes, there's a lot more going on than meets the eye.

Navigating the IT Landscape: Balancing Hybrid Cloud and Cloud Repatriation to Stay in Control of Your Infrastructure

To secure their data, certain industries have strict regulations regarding data storage, requiring data to be kept in specific geographic locations or under stringent security measures. This is yet another reason for organizations nowadays to switch back to on-prem resources.

Experts predict AI will continue impacting KM in 2025

AI continues to disrupt the knowledge management space and experts in the field predict that it's a trend that still hasn't reached its full potential, yet. In 2025 there's more room for improvement.

The transformative role of AI in the next generation of records management

While there are many ways AI will disrupt and advance the records management process, these four key applications will make the biggest impact: automating document classification and tagging, records retention and data hygiene, leveraging natural language processing for record analysis and predictive analytics for records management.

Navigating the risks and challenges of AI (quickly): Create an AI governance program

A strong AI governance program is essential to ensuring compliance and reducing risk. An equally important benefit is that by developing the governance program at the same time the AI application is being developed, issues can be identified early, thus avoiding system redesign or rework on the tail end.

The Long- and Short-Term Impacts of AI Technologies

A much less-known but arguably more critical tech law is Amara's Law, which states that we tend to overestimate the short-term impact of new technology while underestimating its long-term effects.

On Chat AI and BS

So, I'm sticking with hallucinations for all of chat AI's statements, true or false. But that leaves us with a question: Why isn't there a word that perfectly expresses this situation? The answer is easy: LLMs are doing something genuinely new in our history. Our lack of a perfectly apt verb proves it.

Inefficient at the speed of light

While process mining started years ago as a mainly data-driven exercise, its stated goal is to be knowledge-driven. Given KM's multidisciplinary scope, we can play a major role in achieving that goal. Any process, no matter how simple, has the potential to reach across an entire business ecosystem, including all stakeholders. This seems like a perfect match for collaborative workflow, AI/ML, knowledge graphs, human sensemaking, and many of the other arrows in our KM quiver.

The trust problem with GenAI

2023 has been the year of ultra-hyping GenAI, and who is paying for this deluge of marketing? Technology vendors that want us to buy it. Again, it's impressive stuff, but when we shift from selling to buying and ultimately using it, many tough questions need to be asked.

How Telecoms Can Super Charge Their Productivity with Knowledge Management

Nestlé improves end-user experience with RightAnswers

Paychex’s Road to Award-Winning KCS™

The Power of Personalization in the Contact Center