InformationWeek

October 2, 2000

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Antidote For Information Overload

continued...page 2 of 4

More on knowledge collaboration:

sidebar: Vendors Upgrade Groupware For The Web

Keep Your Knowledge In-House (9/4/00)

EETimes: Need: Net-speed knowledge tools (9/4/00)

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"They aren't going to displace Microsoft Outlook or GroupWise, but they make it easier for people to get out of their own information islands," Creese says of the new offerings. These tools are proving especially popular with knowledge workers who must deal with a wide range of information, such as corporate researchers and product development managers.

The tools are also catching the attention of smaller businesses that need groupware for collaboration but can't afford the expense and overhead of conventional packages. These are the early adopters of the new online collaboration tools. Apart from these users, however, interest in the tools drops off dramatically, Creese says. The market for these offerings is still fairly small, maybe 25 million users, he estimates. But as information use spreads, the pain of managing that information will spread, and the need for such tools will increase.

Most of these knowledge-collaboration products have only a handful of larger businesses as customers, with most of the use driven by individuals using the tools ad hoc for their particular jobs within a company. Most of the products offer only a few features, though all have plans to integrate additional collaboration functions and support for larger businesses. Also, most of these products only work with Windows PCs.

Though these tools are just getting their footing in the marketplace, they have impressed early adopters by addressing information-management problems previously unsolved by other software.

While large corporate IT departments might see a conflict between the new products and their existing systems, this is not always the case. For example, Ron Litt, CIO at Allied Mortgage Capital Corp. in Houston, searched extensively for a knowledge-management system that could easily manage, present, and share all the documents and forms the compliance department needed to maintain and distribute to the company's 2,500 employees at 500 branches in 49 states.

"We looked at all kinds of content-management systems," Litt says. "There's no end to them." The mortgage industry is heavily regulated and must handle a complex cascade of various federal and state regulations.

Litt, who's also senior VP of compliance, wanted to have an online repository where employees could have access to all these regulatory documents as well as the associated forms and templates for paperwork compliance. Most of the files were in Microsoft Word format, and because of their vast array and groupings, the compliance department wanted a tool to help employees sort through the maze.

Ron Litt Photo by Jim Caldwell But Litt ran into two problems with almost all the knowledge-management software he saw. The first was that he needed a software product that would be easy to use and maintain by nontechnically oriented compliance personnel. Second, most of the products were far too pricey for a limited, nonrevenue-producing use such as regulatory compliance.

Litt's search ended with Correlate from Correlate Technologies, which stood out because of its unique way of displaying information diagrammatically, which makes it easy to understand the relationships between documents. Although Litt says the Correlate Knowledge Map information display can take some getting used to, after a quick tutorial, employees actually find it easier to navigate than traditional indexes or hierarchical file displays.

Litt decided to host the service in-house, although the company also offers a hosted service. He purchased Correlate's Web server software and 10 user licenses for the desktop clients (for the individual creation of Knowledge Maps) for $6,000 as an early adopter--a discount of about 40%. Any employee can view Correlate documents for free through the company's intranet.

Litt is one of the few IT executives who has caught on to these tools, but they are certainly getting the attention of knowledge workers.

Estelle Metayer, president of Competia, a portal, community, and online magazine for competitive-intelligence analysis in Montreal, says the knowledge-collaboration tools, especially those with mechanisms for processing Web information, offer big benefits.