Accelerate collaboration, knowledge sharing, and knowledge-based innovation

Portals provide numerous sources of business value. Their primary purpose is to provide convenient, 24/7 access to information. This value can be increased when the portal supports customization and personalization for the user, as then the user can have information pushed to them, rather than having to search. When core business applications are integrated with the portal, companies can realize significant reductions in costs and process cycle times, and employees can have access to multiple applications at once enabling higher quality work. When combined with the tools of enterprise social media, the portal can become a meeting ground for information exchanges between groups in disparate locations.

Content intensive websites are powerful tools of communication with customers and external stakeholders. The value comes from the ease of information being shared, and so these websites need to be built with solid taxonomies, search functionality, and content management solutions. With the introduction of a large number of open source solutions, the cost of building content intensive and interactive websites has gone down considerably.

Iknow has deep experience with all aspects of managing an enterprise portal project, from initial requirements gathering, to creating user groups, to integration with other applications and databases, to roll out and adoption. The power of an enterprise portal is its integration with other systems and data sources; Iknow’s experience in the fields of taxonomy, ontology, and data cleansing allow us to ensure that the information given by these applications, including enterprise search, business intelligence, and business process management, are of the highest quality.

Iknow also has deep expertise in building external websites upon web content management systems. Iknow primarily works using Drupal to create and develop world-class websites. Iknow uses Drupal to integrate content intensive solutions such as customized search engines, external document management systems, and integrated with access to enterprise portals, as well as other internal databases.

Product Landscape

The web 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.

The value of enterprise social media comes from the speed of ideas being shared. Innovation and creative problem solving come from open exchanges between people, and enterprise social media creates networks in which an enterprise can help employees to focus on these tasks as goals and part of company culture. Enterprise social media can also be used to disperse knowledge throughout a company and speed the transfer and adoption of best practices or new protocol.

Iknow has deep experience in managing social technology projects from gathering initial requirements, to creation of authoring tools, to design of interactive web content, to connection with various social networking sites, to design of user interface, to ensuring a smooth rollout and a to customization and deployment of software. Social technology software can be combined with tools such as enterprise content management, customer relations management, social media monitoring, and enterprise capture.

Iknow has completed a number of projects in both public and enterprise social media, from helping an organization roll out a new social networking strategy for understanding problems with their products, to using wikis in a company to gather requirements for creating taxonomy, and continuing the discussion as it was being built.

Business value from expertise profiling is achieved from having immediate and direct access to available expertise. When employees are confronted with a new or difficult assignment, they spend much time hunting for information by sending numerous e-mails, making phone calls, searching their intranet, and using their own personal network to find a suitable expert. Even after all this effort, the employee often fails to find someone with the necessary expertise or solution. Without being able to leverage this expertise, the employee will then start from scratch, leading to longer cycle times for completing tasks and activities and duplicate and redundant work. Expertise profiles improve the quality and speed of execution by increasing cross-silo communication, reducing re-work, and shortening employee ramp-up. Access to internal and external experts through a searchable directory improves a company's performance through faster cycle times, increased efficiency, and better decision making.

Iknow has deep expertise in managing all aspects of expertise profiling systems from initial requirements gathering, to finding experts in an organization, to understanding the use of experts in an organization, to system customization and deployment. Iknow’s experience in enterprise search and community management allows us to find the hidden experts in an organization, and to help you to find them once we do. We have completed expertise profiling projects of all sizes, including designing systems that combine expertise profiling with document management to attach documents to their creators.

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.