Text Mining and the Knowledge Management Space

Factors Driving
Knowledge Management

The biggest business
story of the 90's is the tremendous flow, or glut, of information we face every
day. The fundamental nature of information has changed in terms of volume,
availability and importance.

With the Internet,
Intranets, email and GroupWare systems more data is available to the knowledge
worker than ever before. Customer comments and communications, trade
publications, internal research reports and competitor web sites are just a few
examples of available electronic data.

Intellectual
property and assets are contained within the volumes of information. Leveraging
this value is increasingly important in the competitive market. Even if you do
not make the most of your information, you can rest assured your competitor
will.

Making sense of all
this information has become a difficult proposition. What information is needed
and what can be done with it?

Information
Publishers need to differentiate their information, enhance its value and
increase revenue. Information Managers need to lower the cost for tasks that
require document analysis, to provide better service to their “customers”
and improve the quality of management information systems. Information Users
need to have direct access to relevant information, to gain rapid awareness of
content, and to discover new ideas and relationships.

These needs have
given rise to a rapidly growing class of software products: enterprise knowledge
management products. Recognizing the enormous need to manage and control great
quantities of textual and other information that drive businesses, numerous
vendors have entered the knowledge management market with a wide variety of
products.

One of the
challenges with emerging, dynamic markets is that they are inherently confusing.
Many vendors are eager to be in this market; all offering a wide range of
products covering different parts of the overall problem. The already
overburdened knowledge worker, looking into knowledge management products, must
sort through a range of document management systems, text scanning products,
collaborative workgroup products, and search engines. It can be difficult to
determine which products serve your needs.

Knowledge
Management Market

Many companies
define their products as knowledge management solutions. The reason is clear;
everyone needs a solution for handling the large volume of unstructured
information they confront each day.

According to The
Gartner Group, businesses have paid $1.5 billion to consultants for knowledge
management advice. This is expected to grow to $5 billion by 2001. A market that
size is an attractive opportunity for many companies.

Knowledge management
has a broad definition that evolves as new products come to market. Information
Week describes knowledge management as "...the process of capturing a
company's collective expertise wherever it resides-in databases, on paper, or
in people's heads-and distributing it to wherever it can help produce the
biggest payoff."

Because they handle knowledge
instead of data, knowledge management products either work with existing bodies
of text or encourage collaborative work (to share the unwritten texts in
individuals' heads). The tools and products in the knowledge management market
include search engines, document management systems, and groupware products,
among many others.

One way to consider
the market is from the individual knowledge worker's perspective. What kind of
information are you handling, and where is it located? Do you know what you're
looking for or not? Are you looking for a specific fact (something you know you
need) or do you need to discover what you're missing? Do you know what
information you have

Source: DM Review

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