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GCN Home > 05/08/06 issue

In the know—knowledge management software

In post-9/11 era, knowledge management tools let agencies cross organizational lines and measure performance

By David Essex, Special to GCN

If there has ever been a term of art in IT, it is knowledge management. More a buzzword than a real category, it usually adorns software whose primary purpose is something other than knowledge—most often search, content management or collaboration.

But after years of indifference, the post-9/11 federal government is embracing KM. First, officials view KM’s ability to cross organizational and technical boundaries as a possible fix for the notorious “silos” that may have left the country vulnerable to terrorism, or caused the failed response to Hurricane Katrina.

The same bird’s-eye view of easily digested information that the best KM provides might also aid agency heads who are under increasing pressure to measure performance. It can also make government contact centers more effective at serving constituents. Some agencies are even eyeing it as a way to prevent know-how from walking out the door with the first cohort of retiring baby boomers.

KM’s growth is real. Input of Reston, Va., a government-market research firm, predicts that federal KM spending (mostly software, but also the new hardware needed to run it) will grow 6 percent annually, from $965 million in 2005 to $1.3 billion by 2010. Tellingly, the biggest segment ($538 million in 2005) is for professional services to design and implement KM systems, then train employees to use them.

Federal agencies aren’t just interested in KM; some may be desperate to catch up to executive mandates for improved information sharing and providing common IT architectures.

“Getting the Justice Department to coordinate with other homeland security departments is woefully behind schedule,” said Jim Krouse, Input’s director of public-sector market analysis. “If there’s not any significant movement in the next few months, I would expect to see congressional hearings.”

That’s not to say that other agencies aren’t interested in KM technology’s original purposes. “The primary one is the ever-growing need to make sense of unstructured information,” said David Truitt, president and CEO of MicroLink LLC of Vienna, Va. MicroLink, an integrator, has installed KM solutions built around an enterprise-search engine from Autonomy Inc. of San Francisco, Microsoft Corp.’s SharePoint collaboration server and portals such as Plumtree from BEA Systems Inc. of San Francisco.

More news on related topics: Software Applications, Knowledge Management, Management



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