American companies will spend $73 billion on knowledge management software this year and spending on content, search, portal, and collaboration technologies is expected to increase 16% in 2008, according to a recently-released report from AMR Research.
Knowledge management systems, which facilitate the aggregation and dissemination of a company’s collective intelligence, provide numerous benefits, including enabling innovation and improving process efficiency.
But successfully implementing these systems can be a challenge.
While technology advances have eased some of the installation and integration hurdles, Jim Murphy, AMR’s knowledge management research director, says companies looking to do wide-scale deployments still face scalability and performance issues. And, as with other information technologies, user adoption presents the biggest test.
Baseline and it sister publication, CIO Insight, have done several knowledge management case studies over the years. Here we invoke five that show how organizations of various shapes and sizes overcame the deployment challenges they faced.