Most firms have had a knowledge management (KM) initiative for some time now. Expensive KM systems are used to manage disparate information from around the company, whether that be in databases, client relationship management systems, document management systems, the intranet, internet or simply shared directories and network drives. However, these usually underperform unless users share the information in the ‘right’ manner. This can prove a problem in two ways, the more sinister of which is the users’ desire not to share their work with the company. The other, more common reason, is the fact that users do not necessarily have the time to contribute their documents, spreadsheets, images and other files.
The desktop revolution that gave us our own processor and our own storage has led to thousands of islands of information sources around a company – the users’ local hard drives. Users can manage their own drives as they wish, but as the volume of files on the drive grows the search functionality provided within the operating system begins to fall down.
