January 2009, [Vol 18, Issue 1]

Features

KM past and future: Solutions for a changing world

Despite today's economic difficulties, there is reason to be cautiously optimistic about the KM industry. Many functions it supports will continue to be needed, perhaps more than ever...

SaaS: flexible, efficient & affordable

Software as a service (SaaS) continues to make inroads into enterprise knowledge management, its progress fueled by the low cost of entry and minimal impact on internal IT resources. In addition, applications can be up and running in a very short time. That combination is helping to support a substantial growth rate for a number of SaaS vendors despite the overall economic climate...

A component approach to content

In the multichannel, customer-driven world in which we live, the pressure to meet ever-increasing information demands has never been more acute or complex. Yet, the birth of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) file format and the component content management (CCM) systems that leverage XML provide us with the tools to meet those demands. But tools are just that, tools to be used, and without a broader understanding and strategy for their use, they are of little value...

Retailers look to KM to drive business

In this difficult economic climate, retailers face more daunting challenges than ever. Many are using knowledge management solutions to help improve sales and their bottom line. The tools help retailers in such areas as managing inventories, driving marketing programs, targeting and retaining customers, and providing superior customer service...

News Analysis

Speaking in tongues, Part 2:
Foreign language KM technologies

This article is the second of a two-part series on foreign language knowledge management technologies that can help you meet those foreign language challenges. In the first article (in the July/August 2007 issue of KMWorld), I focused on foreign language tools to support unstructured text mining software, which provides users with natural language processing, language identification, transliteration and name normalization capabilities.

Google’s chrome-plated bulldozer

Everything is fragmented— The core principles

In an earlier column, I wrote about the science of complex adaptive systems (see Nov./Dec. 2008 KMWorld), which is a key piece of underlying theory to help us comprehend the increasingly interdependent and co-evolving worlds of knowledge management, social computing and learning...

David Weinberger

What crowds are wise at

"...now we slap the "wisdom of the crowd" or "crowd sourcing" label on everything, as if to say: "Nope. You got your assumptions wrong. Get 'em right, and we can build the world's greatest encyclopedia, replace network TV and find lost cufflinks...

The Future of the Future

The Future of the Future:
From nomads to knowmads:
Knowledge cities rise from the desert sands