Strategic advice to leverage new technologies
Technology is at the heart of nearly every enterprise, enabling new business models and strategies, and serving as the catalyst to industry convergence. Leveraging the right technology can improve business outcomes, providing intelligence and insights that help you make more informed and accurate decisions. From finding patterns in data through data science, to curating relevant insights with data analytics, to the predictive abilities and innumerable applications of AI, to solving challenging business problems with ML, NLP, and knowledge graphs, technology has brought decision-making to a more intelligent level. Keep pace with the technology trends, opportunities, applications, and real-world use cases that will move your organization closer to its transformation and business goals.
Insight
With larger organizations undertaking agile project management and development methods in significant ways, issues around what I've referred to as "agile integration" are becoming more and more important to successful agile implementation. Agile integration involves all the enterprise and organizational issues that must be addressed for agile practices and principles to become fully integrated into an organization's ways of doing business.
A cornerstone of the knowledge management (KM) movement has been that organizations house an abundance of knowledge and yet individuals have difficulty locating this knowledge and putting it to effective use. It has been common to hear of organizations not knowing what they know or, if they do know what they know, of not knowing where to find it. The chief knowledge officer of a large consulting organization once said to me, "We have 80,000 people scattered around the world that need information to do their jobs effectively.
INTRODUCTION
In late 2005, Cutter Consortium conducted an international survey to explore knowledge management (KM) practices and issues among its clients. This survey cannot be expected to cover general KM issues and practices since the respondents for the most part represent information and communication technology perspectives; the survey results are considered with that view in mind.
With this issue of CBR, we set out to investigate an area of managerial practice that could be considered mature. It has been over a decade now that knowledge management has been defined, that its practice has been adopted by organizations, and that it has become an offering of consulting companies. Yet for as much attention that has been devoted to the topic, satisfactory results still elude a good portion of the organizations that attempt to use it.
Survey Methods
This survey explored the use of knowledge management in 117 organizations worldwide. Of responding organizations, 47% are headquartered in North America, 21% in Europe, 17% in Asia/Pacific, and the remainder in South America (7%), the Middle East (4%), and Africa (4%). Forty-six percent of respondents identified their organization as being in the computer industry (computer software publisher, computer hardware manufacturer, computer consulting, outsourcing/Web services/ISPs); 12% are in financial services; and the remainder cover a broad range of industries.
In this issue of Cutter Benchmark Review, we focus on a topic that has been in and out of the limelight since the mid-1990s when it became one of the hottest topics in boardrooms, management publications, and consulting briefs: knowledge management (KM).
