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

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