Technology and the Global Supply Chain

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Next big land rush: believe it or not, is knowledge management

By Kevin O'Marah | April 10, 2009, 8:11am PDT

Summary

This sounds silly for anyone who has ever been involved in the typical hapless library exercise of a digital “knowledge management” initiative.  The lasting image for most of these efforts is of a black hole - everything goes in, nothing comes out.  But get ready for a change of tune.
The root of this is an [...]

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Supply Chain, Collaboration, Knowledge, IP, Entertainment, Supply Chain Management (SCM), Knowledge Management, Strategy, Network Technology, Networking, Enterprise Software, Software, Management, AMR Research
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This sounds silly for anyone who has ever been involved in the typical hapless library exercise of a digital “knowledge management” initiative.  The lasting image for most of these efforts is of a black hole - everything goes in, nothing comes out.  But get ready for a change of tune.

The root of this is an exploding need among all players up and down the global supply chain to harness and leverage their intellectual property without giving up control or worse, having it hijacked and used against them.  An example is the kind of engineering intensive knowledge stored in the heads of thousands of soon-to-retire manufacturing process guys in the chemicals industry.  I talked to ExxonMobil about this and found they’re keen to solve it before the IP ends up sitting on a beach in Florida somewhere.  At the exact opposite end of the spectrum is the issue of managing IP for a company like Hasbro.  They have pure entertainment images that will manifest as profitable toys like Barbie, unless someone raids the files and dumps a load of cheap counterfeit knockoffs onto the market.

How do you capture, catalog, update, distribute, and otherwise collaborate on knowledge (i.e., IP) when it ranges from expertise to trademarks?  It turns out practically every technology vendor category has an answer for you.  Collaboration vendors from little guys like Jive to big guys like OpenText have a story.  B2B and EDI guys like Sterling Commerce, GXS, and Inovis are part of the puzzle.  PLM guys like Dassault, PTC or Siemens are certainly in the mix.  Digital Rights Management vendors have been thought of largely in terms of media and entertainment uses, but players like Adobe, EMC, and even Oracle (with its Stellent property) deserve a look on this front.  Plus the security vendors like Symantec, EMC and RSA need to be considered.  And finally, all the platform guys figure into the equation - IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle all appear across the board with “solutions” in each of these categories.

The net of it all is that manufacturers and retailers across sectors will absolutely need to handle the question of how IP works its way around the global supply chain.  One worry: letting Microsoft Sharepoint creep in as the defacto standard for management of IP in interenterprise collaboration.  Its so easy to set up and start using… it naturally links to your most familiar workspace, namely Excel, PowerPoint, and the rest of MSOffice.  But where is the control and scalability?  I’m not saying Microsoft can’t do it, just that renegade groups of employees doing it on their own will almost definitely end up making a mess, and possibly and expensive one.

Missing from the list of vendors with a solid pitch here is SAP.  The ERP backbone of choice for so many companies may have a stranglehold on transactions, but they lack punch when it comes to interenterprise collaboration, relying on partners like Seeburger and Crossgate.  This may seem a sideshow in Walldorf, but every industry is beginning to see the value of stuff that is presently flying around the digital supply chain, largely unsupervised.

I’d love to hear ideas on how best to map out a strategy for this problem.

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Talkback Most Recent of 3 Talkback(s)

  • Either that or "Common Sense Management"
    Don't forget, in bad times as the unemployed #'s go up, it's
    not very complicated that Internet service demand will go
    down in order to cut to save cash.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    dascha1
    04/10/2009 10:15 AM
  • Look at the path followed by the BBC
    The BBC over the last 9 years or so is the perfect
    model of how to exploit a huge storage of IP in a
    variety of forms. Basic it comes do to effective
    standardization of metadata, which is data that
    describes data, across the enterprise so that the IP
    can be successfully exploited. Most enterprise IP is
    not in transactional form, but are paper based so that
    may account for SAP's lack interest in knowledge
    management.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    TJGodel
    04/13/2009 07:46 AM
  • Successful KM requires more than just technology
    KM is a process that requires more than just a technology solution. It also requires internal best practice adherence, management ownership/sponsorship, metric tracking/reporting, and so on. Technology is simply a facilitator of good KM within an organization.

    An organization can spend many hundreds of thousands of dollars on a technology suite, but cannot be assured an improvement in the overall management of the knowledge in the organization unless it commits to and executes on the other aspects of the initiative.

    A driver of the re-emergence of KM, as pointed out in this article, is that technology (through Web 2.0 technologies) is now better equipped to help address some of the other areas of KM, such as best practice adherence, collaboration, community building etc.

    John Callan
    http://blog.inmagic.com
    ZDNet Gravatar
    John Callan
    04/14/2009 09:58 AM

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