Technologies

Enterprise Content Management

Nearly all knowledge management projects involve Enterprise Content Management systems at some level—they represent a core platform for content creation, sharing, and administration. The importance comes from the fact that ECM is most often the best way to integrate all the various content sources within the company. Getting a handle on ECM first involves identifying all the processes within the enterprise where content is created, edited, stored, and distributed.

Business Value

Content management systems support key business processes and functions, such as helping market and sell products and services, supporting existing customers, supporting sales channels, and helping educate customers, employees, and business partners. Iknow’s experience as business leaders helps us to create the business cases that justify the overarching investments in content management. These investments lower content processing costs, shorten business process cycle times, create higher quality outputs, and increase collaboration and sharing. Iknow has the experience optimizing the process of capturing, storing, finding, and reusing an organization's intellectual assets and by automating the content formatting and publication process to multiple delivery channels, including print, web, cell phones, handheld tablets and wireless devices, and syndication (RSS).

Iknow has experience in all aspects of Enterprise Content Management systems from initial requirements gathering, to the design and implementation of the software. For each company, the use of content management will be different, whether it tends towards document management, records management, digital asset management, or, more likely, some combination. Iknow takes into account the balance of where and in what in form the company has the information.

Product Landscape

The enterprise content management product landscape is complex and includes the following products. Iknow can help you evaluate and select the right software product to help you achieve your business objectives.

eDiscovery

eDiscovery is mainly used to support civil litigation that involves the exchange of any type of electronic information. However, these tools can also be used as a knowledge management tool to mine the current documents within a content repository. eDiscovery tools mine through the content looking to match up information from either a taxonomy or set of training documents, to find similar kinds of information.

Business Value

Iknow can bring eDiscovery beyond the legal discipline, the traditional core users. These tools can reduce costs for legal firms by reducing the obvious cost of manually going over tons of electronic documents, but also in pharmaceutical firms, technology firms, and any other organization where there is a need to go over a large corpus of documents to look for specific terms or match documents.

eDiscovery can also reduce the costs of information governance within an organization, by helping to ensure that records are disposed on time and in adherence with regulations. As any organization gains a large enough corpus of content, it can be helpful to go back through and ensure that records were supposed to be disposed of were actually done. Iknow helps organizations on best practices for eDiscovery, using it to improve their usage of their own content and external content.

Document Management

Document Management systems involve a set of business processes and technologies for managing the “document lifecycle”, i.e., the creation, approval, use, retrieval, revision, archival and disposal of documents. This software organizes document production, accessibility and distribution, as well as tools for overseeing document workflow. Document Management differs from Enterprise Content Management as it focuses completely on the status of documents and collaborating to create new documents.

Business Value

The value of document management comes from building a connected system of documents that can be collaborated on and found easily. Iknow can manage all aspects of the document management system from initial requirements gathering, to creation of document templates, to design of production workflow, to system deployment. When installing new document management systems, Iknow brings experience in change management and business process redesign to ensure that the new system is not only implemented within the technology but also within the culture of the organization.

Iknow has experience in building the soft technologies that are necessary as a backbone to document management software, including large taxonomies and metadata. We ensure that the business process is redesigned to ensure that they can easily fit within the current daily work processes. We have completed projects handling document management systems of all sizes, allowing for real-time access to digital forms of paper-based documents, for access to documents 24/7 and across multiple locations.

Iknow has also built custom connectors between document management systems and enterprise search, enterprise content management, and digital asset management systems.

Product Landscape

The document management product landscape is complex and includes the following products. Iknow can help you evaluate and select the right software product to help you achieve your business objectives.

Collaboration Tools

Collaboration is broadly defined as two or more people working together to solve a particular problem or to achieve a common objective. Collaboration software allows people who are geographically separate to work together in a virtual environment, to exchange insights, create joint documents, and complete work together.

Business Value

Collaboration environments provide more than just a better way of working together, sharing ideas, and resolving work-related problems. Virtual collaborative environments increase productivity, shorten process cycle times, and reduce travel and meeting costs. Additionally, if the knowledge of a team or group is made available to others, then the organization also benefits from content reuse, sharing of best practices and the lessons learned from previous employees. All parts of a collaboration software system can be enhanced by enterprise search, enterprise content management, and digital asset management.

Iknow has deep expertise in managing all phases of collaboration projects, from initial requirements gathering through system design, customization, and deployment. We have addressed and solved a variety of collaboration issues, including identifying business needs of product teams, project teams, and functional groups; prioritizing desired software functionality; conducting software product assessments; implementing the collaboration software; configuring access control and identity management; and resolving security issues.

Business Intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) refers to the gathering, organization, analysis and communication of actionable information on a company, its competitors, its customers, and the industry to support strategic and tactical decision-making. BI applications integrate structured and unstructured data from a variety of sources and synthesize the results into forms that allow business leaders to take action. BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations.

Business Value

Value from business intelligence comes from information access and visibility, and from data mining and analysis to discover trends and patterns in the data. BI is best utilized when executives and managers have ease of access and are able to allow the facts of situations to inform their business decisions. A broad range of applications for BI has helped companies rack up impressive ROI figures. Business intelligence has been used to identify cost-cutting ideas, uncover business opportunities, roll enterprise resource planning data into accessible reports, react quickly to retail demand and optimize prices.

Iknow has deep expertise in managing all phases of business intelligence projects, from understanding management reporting needs and discovering clear ROI goals to defining performance metrics to BI software selection, customization, and deployment. Iknow also combines expertise in data profiling, data quality, data warehousing, and enterprise search to improve the quality of BI projects. Examples of BI projects include business performance analysis and reporting, customer analytics, and balanced scorecards.

Product Landscape

The business intelligence product landscape is complex and includes the following products. Iknow can help you evaluate and select the right software product to help you achieve your business objectives.

Business Process Management and Workflow Automation

Business process management (BPM) deals with the automation, coordination and control of business processes through software. Alternative terms for BPM include business process automation (BPA) and workflow management. BPM and workflow automation systems coordinate business and knowledge processes according to a process model. Many commercial BPM and workflow software tools are quite sophisticated and can handle complicated business logic, resource availability, queues, and load balancing.

Business Value

Business value from business process management comes from numerous sources. Workflow automation shortens business process cycle times and improves quality levels, resulting in higher levels of customer and stakeholder satisfaction. Standardized electronic forms are less costly than paper-based forms and automated input checking and verification lower the amount of errors and rework. Internal processing costs are also reduced because of strict adherence to the business rules.

Iknow has deep expertise in managing all phases of business process management and workflow automation projects, from initial requirements gathering through system deployment. We have worked on projects of various sizes and scopes, including business process and knowledge process mapping, design, and reengineering; Total Quality Management, Six Sigma, Lean Manufacturing, and other quality-related improvement initiatives; performance measurement, including metrics definition and the creation of balanced scorecards; software requirements definition and package selection; and system customization and implementation.

Digital Asset Management

Digital asset management (DAM) refers to the business processes, software, and the repository for capturing, storing, and retrieving any and all types of digital content. Digital asset management systems can store multiple types of digital assets along with a variety of related metadata, such as keywords, image thumbnails, and usage rights of the digital content, to facilitate searching and asset management. A digital asset management system usually uses a combination of access controls, based on the individual asset, the user’s permissions, or both.

Business Value

Iknow helps organizations design and implement DAM systems to help them manage their existing digital assets, facilitate the production of media pieces, help market or sell products or services, support existing customers, support sales channels, and help educate employees and business partners. The ability to find, share, and reuse them quickly, when needed, adds value by shortening critical process cycle times and reducing costs.

Iknow has deep expertise in managing all phases of digital asset management projects, from initial requirements gathering through system deployment. Iknow provides value for Digital Asset Management system by bringing our expertise in taxonomy development and metadata management to help implement best practices in the system implementation. We have worked on projects of various sizes and scopes—from cataloging a few hundred images with keywords for a workgroup to processing hundreds of thousands of images (along with related data and maintaining 24/7 access) for thousands of users.

Iknow builds DAM systems alongside other technologies, such as enterprise content management, enterprise search, web content management, and taxonomy development software. We design custom connectors for each of these systems, to help our clients to create value from each of them in concert. The end result is a system that supports the entire enterprise.

Product Landscape

The digital asset management product landscape is complex and includes the following products. Iknow can help you evaluate and select the right software product to help you achieve your business objectives.