Written by David Tebbutt in October 2004

Type "knowledge management software" into Google and you get over 50,000 hits. This means that my article (elsewhere in this issue) will have offended masses of people who think they're in the knowledge management business.

The fundamental issue is that knowledge is what you know and once you communicate some tiny subset to the outside world, it becomes information. It might be good information but it lacks the rich contextual links that exist inside your head.

Good editing, tagging and linking can beef up the value of your contribution, sometimes beyond your original intention. But, fundamentally, people cannot learn as much from reading (or listening to) your outputs as they can from meeting you and engaging in conversation. This is, of course, a non-starter except for those bound to you through work, family, friendship, bribery or common interest.

Low in the information hierarchy are the transaction records captured and stored, the product brochures, web pages, support call logs and suchlike. They are all massively useful to those who need them at any given moment, for any given purpose, providing they've been indexed.

Mike Davis, a knowledge management specialist at IT analyst company, Butler Group, predicts a great future for discovery and visualisation tools. Anything that can help people navigate and make sense of the masses of information available is absolutely vital. Tom Jenkins, CEO of Open Text Corporation, claims that, "in large corporations, unstructured information is doubling every two months." Without some advanced information management tools, we're just going to drown in the stuff.

Fortunately many tools already exist, even if they haven't made the mainstream yet. We all know about search engines and content management software which keeps track of all information records, be they the results of computer processing or user interaction, such as emails. Presentation to the user can be massively enhanced through portal technology such as that provided by Plumtree. Users are provided just the information sources they need to do their job. Helpdesk users have already had their work transformed by being able to call all relevant information to their desktops in an instant.

The discovery stuff that Davis alluded to is very interesting. He says that organisations like Factiva, which are used to providing authoritative sources of information, are now eyeing weblogs as a valuable source. Obviously they'll be choosy about which blogs have the necessary authority, but this new source promises to deliver valuable insights to its clients. Frankly, I'd rather have Factiva rummaging for me and presenting the results in context than have to slog through a blog by hand, so to speak.

When it comes to visualisation, we are already used to seeing colour to determine the height of the land or depth of the sea in maps. The financial community has been using colour coding to group stocks by performance, allowing drill down into the real names and numbers. Well, the same can be done with search results. The answers could be grouped - maybe red for lots of hits, or for high relevance, and pale blue for hardly any at all, or low relevance. A company called Fractal Edge isn't yet in the textual information space but its technology shows great promise as both an analysis and a navigation tool. It uses shaded overlapping circles to reveal values and relationships. Click on any one to drill deeper.

Developments like these will make users' lives easier and more productive. But knowledge management they are not. Software suppliers won't abandon the term, so I wonder if they could be persuaded to put the word 'ersatz' in front?

No, I thought not.