Knowledge Management Builds A Niche

<B> Knowledge Management Builds A Niche</B>

By Mary Ann McNulty


The new buzzword that is racing through corporate boardrooms is knowledge management.

Part technology, part business sense, it's a broadly defined and sure-to-become-overused marketing term to describe the gathering, organizing and distributing of information within an organization. It is several steps beyond data warehousing.

It could very well solve an age-old problem for corporate travel decision makers: how to disseminate relevant information to those who need it in the enterprise. It also raises a whole list of other challenges, not the least of which is securing comprehensive, accurate data to disseminate.

Ovum, a technology and telecommunications group with offices in Boston and London, defines knowledge management as "the task of developing and exploiting an organization's tangible and intangible knowledge resources, and covering organizational and technologic issues." Ovum defines the market as growing from $285 million in 1998 to $1.6 billion in 2002, while the accompanying consulting market grows from $1.5 billion to just over $5 billion.

Vendors are lining up with KM announcements. At its European user conference last week, SAP AG announced its new Knowledge Warehouse, a Web-enabled information gathering environment that includes content and powerful tools to create a network of information resources for transferring knowledge and enhancing employee performance. Lotus Development Corp. and its parent, IBM, last month launched an Institute for Knowledge Management, a research consortium composed of member corporations, representatives from Lotus and IBM research groups and several universities. Microsoft in February said its planned knowledge management applications most likely will appear in 2000.

The Yankee Group last month formed an Enterprise Knowledge Management Planning Service and released a report that tracked 150 providers of six product and service categories. "Managers can no longer assume that competition is the same old bank, communications firm, department store or publisher," said Mark O'Connor, associate director of the new service. "At the same time, organizations have not fully leveraged employee expertise, best practices, intellectual property, high-value content, and relationships with customers, regulators and strategic partners."

Research by The Delphi Group Inc. showed collaborative, intellectual asset and customer relationship applications at the top of organizations' knowledge management priority lists. In March, Boston-based Delphi reported that improving the effectiveness of collaborative work is the top priority for the development of knowledge management practices, according to a survey of 300 organizations engaged in KM activities. Among the other priorities are Internet content management, international asset management, customer relationship management and even e-commerce.

New research from The Delphi Group indicates that during the next two years corporate portal sites rapidly will become the interface of choice for professionals to interact with previously disparate corporation information and processes, as well as with the Internet.

"Portal development is a necessary second stage in the maturing of corporate intranets and an indicator of the tremendous promise of the medium inside the organization," said Delphi's research director Hadley Reynolds. In a survey of over 300 Global 2000 organizations, 55 percent said they already have corporate portal projects underway, 17 percent have production sites up and 38 percent are evaluating, planning or piloting portal implementations. By the beginning of 2001, nearly 90 percent of larger organizations will have moved into portal deployments, with 80 percent showing corporate portals in production mode. A portal is another buzzword to describe the entryway to an intranet or the Internet, such as Yahoo!, America On Line or a corporate site that lists links to all relevant sites.

Development of the corporate portal and the whole knowledge management area could be good news for travel managers, in that it provides the means to disseminate relevant travel management data throughout an organization. Of course, the problem is securing that relevant data (see Siemens story, page 64). If this area matures, it puts much greater emphasis on the various industry efforts to standardize data (see Prism story, page 1).

Many major travel agencies, as well as card providers are working on launching their Web-based reporting offerings later this year. A handful of vendors already have deployed their offerings, including card provider Paymentech and travel agency Travel Incorporated.

But much richer data sets are expected later this year and next, report several vendors, including Pegasus Business Intelligence. Taking the yield and data management skills she's honed over the past 20 years at Walt Disney World and Hilton International, Cindy Estis Green, senior vice president of the business intelligence unit, is developing ways to capture and mine data coming through its various booking channels for both hoteliers and corporations. The plan is to offer not only activity reports, but better pricing packages, yield management, reservation trends, Internet booking trends and even some customer relationship management insight.

"We're well on our way," Green said. "We have a lot of the system built now and will be testing this month and next. In a year, we'll be much further along, with the ability to send all this information.