The situation

Knowledge management (KM) comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences. Such insights and experiences comprise knowledge, either embodied in individuals or embedded in organizational processes or practice.

Enterprise Knowledge Management is the next stage in the evolution of organizational processes and practice, emerging as the missing ingredient of popular management strategies. Today the economy of knowledge is already a reality, recognized by the European Union as a major factor in durable growth and shown by recent OECD studies to influence productivity.

The shift to knowledge as the primary source of value results in the new economy being led by those who manage knowledge effectively. Today's organisations are creating and leveraging knowledge, data and information at an unprecedented pace – a phenomenon that makes the use of technology not an option, but a necessity.

The solution

Organisations and business decision makers spend a great deal of resources and make significant investments in the latest technology, systems and infrastructure to support knowledge management. It is imperative that these investments are validated properly, made wisely and that the most appropriate technologies and software tools are selected or combined to facilitate knowledge management leading to better decision-making and promoting continuous improvement.

In order to respond to this need, we are equipped not only with the know-how to analyze each customer's information integration and flow requirements, but also with a suite of tools that can be combined to best meet these requirements:

• Content Lifecycle Management with support for Multi-Channel Publishing
• Information Access Management
• Navigation in Meta-Structures
• Intelligent Search
• Profile Driven Push Technology.

All of the above are accessed via a Web2.0 interface, with support for Community & Security and additional Collaborative Features such as wikis, blogs, instant messaging, message boards, shared bookmark and calendar, Announcements & Alerts, RSS feed aggregation and custom information integration adapters.

Benefits

According to Ernst & Young consulting agency research, KM Software usage enables up to 30% savings on customer support and increases up to 50% decision-making quality, staff agility, and company reaction speed to changes of market needs. IMC Enterprise KM solutions enable effective information sharing that results in:

• Faster and more accurate location of shared information. By facilitating local and remote sharing, searching, rating and printing of company documents and procedures every organization member has access to the same single version of a document from the same location. Finding relevant information faster leads to improved productivity.
• Reuse of existing knowledge and accumulation of new knowledge. Enabling access to company-wide policies, procedures and how-to guides and all sorts of documented and shared knowledge leads to reduced training time for new organization members and a boost in productivity. All organization members learn from each other's mistakes and take advantages of each other's attainments. Additionally, loss of expertise when members of the organization leave is minimized.
• Facilitating collaborative work. By establishing new groups or strengthening existing ones and enabling them to work together, regardless of whether they are physically collocated, productivity is improved and the work environment ethos is promoted.
• Improving customer support. By enabling customers to quickly and easily find the information they are looking for via a Web2.0-based interface instead of submitting emails or calling your support department, customer support is improved while the associated costs are decreased.

Is this relevant for me?

A broad range of organizations can benefit from Enterprise Knowledge Management:

• Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) can pursue an incremental, mix-and-match strategy, based on our solutions' ability to deliver a unique combination of tools and functionality tailored specifically to your needs and budget.
• Larger enterprises may pursue a holistic approach, including business process reengineering and platform deployment that can seamlessly integrate with existing infrastructure.
• Governmental organizations can also selectively utilize techniques and tools to implement an incremental shift to the KM paradigm, leveraging their existing know-how, infrastructure and content.
• Any organization aiming to support collaborative working scenarios in a distributed setting may benefit from EKM.

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