Knowledge Management Tools and Integration

Through its strategic partnerships with Hyperwave and Smartlogik, two companies that have invested heavily in research and development over the past decade, AQUAS is able to offer outstanding knowledge management solutions that have generated substantial return on investment for major government agencies and private corporations throughout the world.

Web Content Management
Features include:

• Automatic link maintenance - Hyperlinks connecting documents are created dynamically, on the fly, when a person visits your intranet or Internet site, thus completely eliminating the problem of dead links
• Drag & Drop document publication - Administrative support personnel can simply drag & drop files from a desktop to your Internet or intranet site. A webmaster is not needed to publish your documents

Benefits include:

• Reduced web maintenance costs - Since a webmaster is not needed to handle document publication or link maintenance, the overall cost of maintaining a website can be greatly reduced
• Complete elimination of embarrassing dead links Less expensive and faster publication of documents
  

Customized Knowledge Management Portals
Features include:

• Information pulled from diverse sources including the user's hard drive, the organization's network, the Internet and even paid information services, and presented to each employee in a configurable, customized format according to his or her job function and security level
• The ability to handle over 200 different file formats including MS Office, multimedia formats, HTML, XML, PDF and Lotus Notes
• Find subject expert function
• Automatic notification when content changes

Benefits include:

• Reduced research time and costs
• Enhanced ability to quickly react to news and developments
• Greatly enhanced employee ability to access the expertise in people's heads
  
• Increased collaboration and exchange of ideas
  
• Elimination of costly, redundant efforts - employees can quickly locate needed documents, research reports, etc. They don't have to recreate the wheel.
  
• Transformation of an organization's intangible tacit knowledge into a real asset that can be put to work to save time, reduce costs, and aide in collaborative efforts

Knowledge Management Solutions in the Real World

The Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs
The Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs decided to use Smartlogik's knowledge management portal to provide its staff with a single source of news gathered from several different internal and external sources. The Ministry was concerned that collecting news from several different sources could result in vital news being missed. According to Anja Rasmussen, Head of Library Services at the Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Smartlogik "will make it much easier for our staff to access the exact information they need more quickly than ever. Smartlogik's integrated alerting solution will also ensure that staff have all the latest news relevant to them exactly when they need it."

The Nature Conservancy
The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest conservation organization, faced two problems, common to many organizations:

• Employees had difficulty finding documents unless they knew exactly where to look
• Changes to either the information or the hierarchy often meant documents were orphaned and lost, and also resulted in intranet links that led nowhere.

The Nature Conservancy selected Hyperwave because its knowledge management system does not require heavy investments in infrastructure or IT personnel. The organization also considered Hyperwave's technology for managing the relational and navigational hyperlinks between documents. This built-in functionality helps ensure that documents don't become orphaned and that users never face the frustration of clicking on broken links resulting from the movement or deletion of a target document.

"Our employees are very busy and don't have time to waste on dead-end researching," said Grove. "We expect to save time and leverage existing knowledge. "The Hyperwave system will support The Nature Conservancy's learning and research environment. Employees around the globe will be able to use powerful search tools to find documents on any topic, from how to execute a conservation easement to how to get rid of a pesky, invasive weed. When the documents on file aren't enough for the situation at hand, Hyperwave's expertise location function will help them find the right person to contact.

The Nature Conservancy plans to store some 300,000 documents on the Hyperwave Information Server, including Microsoft Word, WordPerfect and text files as well as PDF and graphics files. Founded in 1951, The Nature Conservancy has over 3,000 employees in 300 different locations in 30 countries. The group has over one million members around the world.