Why Knowledge Management, Content Management and Wikis are colliding...
Knowledge management, content management and wiki have one very important ingredient, information. Communication has been viewed over the years as a necessary evil to maintaining good business and trying to keep employees, sales, partners and any constituent up to date. Meetings are held, emails sent, intranets created all for the purpose of gathering and distributing information.
Knowledge management in Wikipedia is defined as such:
Knowledge Management programs attempt to manage the process of creation or identification, accumulation, and application of knowledge or intellectual capital across an organization. Knowledge Management, therefore, attempts to bring under one set of practices various strands of thought and practice relating to:
Content management within Wikipedia is defined as such:
Web content management systems are often used for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing industry-specific documentation such as news articles, operator'smanuals, technical manuals, sales guides, and marketing brochures. A content management system may support the following features:
Import and creation of documents and multimedia material
Identification of all key users and their content management roles
The ability to assign roles and responsibilities to different content categories or types.
Definition of the content workflow tasks, often coupled with event messaging so that content managers are alerted to changes in content.
The ability to track and manage multiple versions of a single instance of content.
The ability to publish the content to a repository to support access to the content. Increasingly, the repository is an inherent part of the system, and incorporates enterprise search and retrieval.
Some content management systems allow the textual aspect of content to be separated to some extent from formatting. For example the CMS may automatically set default color, fonts, or layout.
Features of wikis specifically helpful to a corporation include:
Avoiding e-mail overload. Wikis allow all relevant information to be shared by people working on a given project. Conversely, only the wiki users interested in a given project need look at its associated wiki pages, in contrast to high-traffic mailing lists which may burden many subscribers with many messages, regardless of relevance to particular subscribers.
Accounts Management. Users can be forbidden from viewing and/or editing given pages, depending on their department or role within the organization.
Building consensus. Wikis provide a framework for collaborative writing. Particularly, they allow the structured expression of views disagreed upon by authors on a same page.
Organizing information. Wikis allow users to structure new and existing information. As with content, the structure of data is sometimes also editable by users; see structured wiki.
CustomerVision brings all the bullet points described under Knowledge Management, Content Management and Wikis into one unique blended offering. The goal being that a repository for providing information easily and effectively, rather than traditionally in email, meetings, intranets, or stand-alone system repositories, etc. is better and a key aspect of what users are requiring in the Web 2.0 world.