Criteria for inclusion of products in the KMconnection Knowledge Management Product Guide

Selecting software for inclusion in the KMconnection Knowledge Management Product Guide may tell you more about those who are doing the selecting than about the products selected ... or omitted. Lock three knowledge-management gurus in a room ... and they come out with five definitions of knowledge management. We will not get involved in arguments about the definition of knowledge management. But we have to offer a definition that justifies the scope of this Product Guide:

Knowledge management is concerned with making the knowledge of an organization an explicit, integrated, manageable, cumulative, dynamic shared resource that can be leveraged by all major stakeholders to improve the organization's productivity and competitiveness.

Such a definition has many implications, and it can be interpreted in many ways. (And if you have a different definition of knowledge management ... well, you're right! Because, as someone once said, it all depends on what "is" is. See the article "Market Perspectives on Knowledge Management" on our main Web site, www.KMconnection.com.)

Subsections:

• General criteria for inclusion in the Product Guide
• Characteristics of knowledge management addressed by products in the Product Guide
• Categories of products excluded from the Product Guide
• Really fuzzy areas
• Feedback welcome!

• Only commercial products are included in the Product Guide.
• Only those products that address the requirements in this document are included. If a vendor sells products that are not related to KM requirements (as we define them), those products are not included.
• If a product can be used only as part of a vendor's suite of products, the product will be mentioned in the suite but not treated as a separate entry.
• The Knowledge Management Connection reserves the right to include or exclude a product and to categorize it as it judges appropriate, without explanation or justification. However, we strongly encourage vendors to include their products and to assist us in appropriate categorization.
• All vendors are notified by email of inclusion of their products in this Product Guide. Vendors may choose not to have their products included.
• Comparisons to other vendors and their products are not acceptable. We do not accept or include critiques of products by competitors or other third parties.
• Recommendations for inclusion are strongly encouraged.

In the business environment, "knowledge" implies stuff that is useful and applicable to current requirements. We like that focus. But the term actionable knowledge is limiting. Sometimes value is created when content is simply shared -- that is, when information is found quickly (where it might not have been found before) or delivered quickly -- and contributes to an individual's understanding. In such cases, there is no direct "action" involved; just an improved ability to integrate and apply knowledge in the future. If a product addresses elements in the following list of characteristics of knowledge management, we have included it in the guide:

• Content-oriented characteristics. Development of content or conversion of existing content into formats appropriate for effective sharing.
  • Discovery through communication, collaboration, or search*.
  • Capture of content with the intent of integration
  • Summarization, as part of the process of making content easier to evaluate (for relevance) and digest
  • Identification of relevance
  • Conversion of content into a resource intended for integration
  • Adding structure that enables re-use
• Integration characteristics (making the connections). Creating semantic accessibility for the domain. Integration (and, therefore, accessibility) may be "passive" -- as in the application of metadata to content.
  • Adding structure that enables integration
  • Categorization and navigation based on categorization
  • Abstraction and normalization of terminology, as a part of the process of categorization
• Use characteristics
  • Collaboration and sharing
  • Visualization and other aids to access
  • Hypertext -- a basic method of traversing connections

Categories of products excluded from the Product Guide

In general, the Knowledge Management Product Guide does not include software in the following broad categories:

• Tools used by narrowly defined groups -- for example, executive information systems, business intelligence applications, or applications used to redefine business processes and workflow. Most of those technologies have well-defined names, in any case, as well as communities and resources devoted to them.
• In general, categories of software that already have well-defined applications and names, especially if they preceded the growth of interest in knowledge management in the mid-1990s -- for example, expert systems. Given those constraints, we have explicitly excluded products that fall primarily into the following specific categories, although many have knowledge management aspects:
• Activity management
• Artificial intelligence and knowledge-based systems
• Contact management
• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems
• Executive information systems
• Expert systems
• Project management tools for individuals
• Records management
• Search engines (of several types)
• Simulation software
• Tools for modification of individual or group behavior, including cultural change
• Transactional systems, including those which focus on "eBusiness"
• Web site construction and management
• Workflow and process management
• Implementations of Kaplan and Norton's "Balanced Scorecard" approach to organizational performance (Products based on this approach appear to be concerned with measurement of many different business metrics, not on improvement of organizational performance through managing knowledge resources.)

This list will certainly evolve.

In addition, we have limited the scope of the Product Guide as a result of practical considerations. We can't manage a resource of 1,000 products at the moment. And we don't want to duplicate good work already done by other resources -- for example, the SearchTools Web site (http://www.searchtools.com/), which already does a great job of helping people identify and select appropriate search engines. We have included such categories, but we try to point you to other resources that already cover the category.

Really fuzzy areas

It's especially difficult to decide whether the following categories of products should belong in our Knowledge Management Product Guide:

• Personal information managers (PIMs). Most are activity-oriented tools for individuals, but some offer genuine knowledge-capture and knowledge-organization features that can help in knowledge-management activities. Some of the "classic" PIMs even offered simple implementations of faceted knowledge organization. However, the information and categorization produced in PIMs usually cannot be integrated easily into a common resource, so it's harder to share any value produced in them. We're tempted to include a subset that meets our general criteria.
• Document and content management systems. Many have "knowledge management" capabilities, but the purpose of such systems is primarily to produce documents for high-volume information environments publishing. Web sites, in themselves, are just another kind of document.
• Customer support systems. What do you do with a product that has important knowledge management features but which carries a label associated with other areas of interest? Customer-support systems have much to do with managing knowledge, but the value they produce is usually confined to the customer support staff and the customers.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. Most CRM systems gather, centralize, and distribute knowledge to several sources. But they may focus too much on highly predictable transactions of data or information to count as knowledge management systems.
• Data mining. Discovering data or "knowledge" in existing resources can add millions to the bottom line of large companies -- especially companies holding hundreds of patents and similar information. But this information is normally used only by a small number of people in the organization ... and data mining easily qualifies as a major product category on its own. New products, including Lotus Discovery Server, are blurring some of the distinctions.

Feedback welcome!

Support for dynamic change is a key characteristic of our definition of knowledge management. Your opinions and recommendations will help improve this resource.

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