Information access gets a boost
Knowledge management, data sharing become critical as companies strive to make information always available
EFFORTS TO strengthen knowledge management and information sharing have accelerated since Sept. 11, according to Gary Bird, corporate vice president of the digitization group at Honeywell, a large aerospace and transportation materials company in Morris Township, N.J.
Prior to Sept. 11, Honeywell began piloting KM (knowledge management) tools from AskMe with the goal of leveraging networks to connect people across geographic and departmental boundaries. Honeywell’s approximately 115,000 employees are spread around the world in nearly 100 countries.
“The major impact of 9/11 has been to accelerate that notion that we need to connect our people much better so they can [more effectively] meet, team, and share through networks versus getting on planes and traveling,” Bird explains.
Furthermore, Sept. 11 was an eye-opener of how quickly business conditions can change, illustrating that enterprises need to be able to adapt quickly, he adds.
“It further reinforced the need to build agility into your organizational design and into your culture,” Bird says. “You need a culture that can shift very quickly and adjust dynamically to changes in the business environment that can happen very dramatically and fast.”
Honeywell is moving forward with its AskMe deployment in hope of attaining that flexibility of culture and fostering simpler and easier connectivity between workers and departments. Sept. 11 “was a resounding statement that said, ‘Yes, your business can change in a matter of seconds.’ In one morning our whole aerospace business shifted dramatically,” Bird says.
Many factors are heightening awareness of the need to preserve corporate knowledge and make it more accessible, says Rob Perry, senior analyst at The Yankee Group in Boston.
“Companies are really looking at … how to collect knowledge, make it redundant, and preserve knowledge and data in the event of a catastrophe,” Perry explains.
There is also an increased push against centralization, so workers don’t have to all be in one location, Perry says. “Portals and knowledge management and that type of technology are being used to enable the remote offices more.”
Software designed to enable location-based, intelligent data integration and sharing is also garnering attention. One company in this space, MapInfo, has worked with the New York City Fire Department, as well as with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other public safety and emergency resource agencies.
MapInfo’s software presents data in map form, exploiting open standards to query myriad back-end databases for information to distribute to other users, according to Brian Lantz, homeland security advisor at Troy, N.Y.-based MapInfo. For example, a police officer arriving first on the scene of a crime can click on the map to quickly find emergency personnel closest to the location, as well as pull data on the street address and surrounding buildings to determine the best way to block off the surrounding area.
“Historically, every agency has its own data, and there’s very little ability to do real-time sharing,” Lantz says. “Our software aims to provide the collaborative ability to share data in open systems.”
MapInfo’s mapping engine is built on pure Java and sports extensions to the major database vendors such as Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, and Informix.
In the wake of Sept. 11, Lantz says MapInfo has been used to do predictive-type analysis, dynamically creating plans that show such things as the location of critical infrastructure or the optimal places to set up triage in case of an emergency.
