Delivering Enterprise Knowledge (28th Nov)

Published: October, 2006

Finding and retrieving information is vital to any organisation, whether to aid decision making, employee education or any other business activity. So users should find it as easy as winking to get at the information they need, when they need it and in the form they need. That's a very big "should" not often matched in practice.

Part of the reason lies in the nature of corporate data. It comes in dozens of formats, sits in any number of places, is often stored higgledy-piggledy and is of variable quality. The range of tools and methods used to get at it is equally diverse. In particular, there is a gulf between the way organisations get at unstructured data and the way they access data held in structured form.

How do you bring all these elements together to provide users with an integrated and comprehensive supply of up-to-date information - using software that is simple to use? Looked at technically, the issue is how you pull enterprise search, business intelligence (BI) and content management - and all the sub-divisions of these - into a single framework. Search has traditionally worked closely with content management but neither has had close interaction with BI or corporate performance management (CPM). This is changing, mainly through increasing integration of search and BI; but it is less the case with BI and enterprise content management (ECM).

How is integration among these tools progressing? What are the software and choices, and decisions, facing you today? Those are questions to be examined at this event.

Objectives of the Day

This is a direction-setting event aimed at giving participants an understanding of the value of using search techniques to extract knowledge value from both structured and unstructured sources - and of the different ways this might be achieved - in order.

World-leading IT analyst Robin Bloor will lead the speakers who will include both vendors and users giving issues-based presentations from their different perspectives. An open debate will follow. A panel will include selected vendors with audience participation with the aim of drawing some firm conclusions.

Who should attend

It will be of special interest to CIOs, CKOs and other senior IT managers from all sizes of organisation.

What you will gain

It will be a valuable opportunity to gain face-to-face interaction with leading experts and vendors who understand how search can be used in conjunction with more familiar software. A preliminary paper will be distributed to you prior to the event outlining the issues. Breaks will facilitate interaction with other delegates. As a follow-up, Roger Whitehead, author of Bloor's report Enterprise-wide Search, will prepare a white paper which be circulated to all attending delegates summarising the day's outcomes and implications for the future. This will also provide a significant contribution to Bloor's continuing research into knowledge management and its future.

Comments? if you have any comments or questions about this issue, please contact us.

Bloor Research