July/August 2008, [Vol 17, Issue 7]

Features

Hospitals play tag—RFID finds a niche in healthcare

Like most healthcare facilities, Washington Hospital Center in the nation's capital used to struggle with asset management: finding the right pieces of equipment when employees needed them. But two and a half years ago, WHC, one of the 25 largest hospitals in the country, sought to address that knowledge management problem by attaching radio frequency identification (RFID) system tags to equipment in order to track them online.

Perspectives on information life cycle management

Information life cycle management (ILM) is a critical component of nearly every business. The efficiency with which information assets are managed—from creation to review, distribution and storage—significantly determines success.

Banks invest in KM

Banks and other financial services firms (mortgage lenders, brokerages, etc.) are using knowledge management to monitor the competition and are starting to share knowledge throughout the enterprise, although they still have a way to go, according to analysts.

Cloud computing and the issue of privacy

Cloud computing remains a promising solution to the challenges of on-premises installation of enterprise applications. The increasing interest in software as a service (SaaS) as a way to control some information technology costs is evident in the Google, Salesforce.com tie-up.

What is e-mail archiving and management?

You know you have an e-mail management problem, but what kind of problem? Defining the exact nature of your problem can be half the battle to finding a solution.

Contacts and connections: an array of options

Business is built on relationships as much as it is on information, and an increasing number of software options are available to help establish and develop relationships. They range from contact management products that collect information while running in the background to Facebook-like enterprise solutions for proactive sharing of professional information.

Information Governance, Risk Management, Legal Discovery, Compliance: Access Innovations

Information Governance, Risk Management, Legal Discovery, Compliance: Symantec

News Analysis

The innovation imperative

KMWorld interviews John Kao, author of Innovation Nation and opening keynote speaker at our annual KMWorld & Intranets Conference (kmworld-intranets.com) Sept. 23 to 25 in San Jose.

Everything is fragmented—Building CoPs for knowledge flow

As promised, I am presenting a step-by-step approach to a low-cost knowledge management (KM) program using social computing, and will focus on the functionality that has been touted but rarely delivered by communities of practice (CoPs).

Green IT: soon, not optional

Compliance requirements for corporations have drastically increased with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and new Federal Rules for Civil Procedure (FRCP). And they're about to get even tougher as Congress debates new rules for capping or exchanging "carbon credits" for controlling emissions and waste.

David Weinberger

The great debates

The Future of the Future

The Future of the Future:EOF update: report from the trenches

I've always liked to keep one foot in the academic world and one in the "real" world. Universities are good at developing theory, which provides foundational principles on which we can base our business decisions, actions and observations. In previous articles, we've presented a simple theoretical framework, which has proven to be successful across a wide range of organizations. It consists of the four pillars of leadership, organization, learning and technology. Let's take a look at how each of these pillars has been playing out, and how you can benefit from what we've learned so far.