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Read application overviews and comparisons in our literature and information section.

The past several years have shown great progress in collaboration technologies: everything from Google search to WebEx to Video Conferencing to Sharepoint has promised the ability to enable collaboration throughout an enterprise.  As useful as these technologies are, however, they leave huge areas where the benefits of collaboration remain untapped.

In our work with organizations, best practices have involved the encoding of policies and procedures through standard operating procedure (SOP) documents or workflow diagrams.  Our research has shown that these documents are not an effective way to communicate the activities that occur within the organization.   Worse still, they often describe an ideal process that is not the way things occur in the trenches, or an outdated process that key experts had abandoned long before.   Because the key individuals have no time to keep these documents current, they remain “on the shelf” gathering dust, while the savvier new employee ignores them in favor of asking the expert directly. 

Enterprise Information Management systems such as Sharepoint or other portals can effectively get documents to the right people.  Doing so does not solve the more fundamental collaboration problem, which is getting the right solution to the right person at the right time.   Likewise, WebEx can enable the expert to communicate their ideas to the group, but they will only communicate what they have distilled into a presentation.    The situational knowledge that is critical to addressing daily problems in dealing with specific suppliers or customers are not addressed during these sessions.   In fact, they are rarely recalled by the expert until the situation demands it: “Ah, yes.  I had a similar situation when the supplier from X told me …”     To enable this kind of collaboration requires that organizations reexamine what they consider to be knowledge assets and how they leverage those assets.

Discovery Machine provides not only the ability to capture the real knowledge assets as they evolve; it also results in the structure needed for effective indexing of those knowledge assets.   How does this work?

A knowledge service model represents the working decomposition of an expert’s strategy for carrying out particular activities across a broad range of scenarios.   Therefore, this hierarchical decomposition is a formal structure that can be used as an index for retrieval.    Also, since the model was created by the expert with help from a knowledge coordinator, it places much of the experts “war stories” into the context of the activity.   The comments and associated documents are all scaffolded within the model and can be accessed by others within that context.

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