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While knowledge management (KM) programs may seemingly sprout up out of cracks in the sidewalk, they are in fact tender plants that require cultivation, care and feeding. Siemens AG, the huge German conglomerate with 426,000 employees in 190 countries, knows this and nurtures its KM with hands-on management and constant tweaking.
Guenther Klementz, Siemens' Chief Knowledge Officer, says that KM first got started on a grass-roots level at the company in 1997 when a group of employees banded together to share their experiences. "KM here is really a bottom-up approach," Klementz says. When employees from the human resources and IT departments realized they were both separately dabbling in KM and both facing the same challenges, they went to management to ask for support for a corporatewide KM initiative. Even with disparate offices around the world and a wide variety of business units in industries such as health and transportation, Siemens represents a fertile landscape for knowledge sharing. Besides, the corporation has such an intense focus on innovation (from 1980 to 2001, the percentage of sales from products five years old or younger climbed from 48 percent to 75 percent) that a coordinated KM program makes terrific sense. A top manager at Siemens helped the KM proponents prepare a paper that eventually led to the creation of a small corporate team to coordinate KM initiatives around the company.

Knowledge management commands a great deal of attention these days. But is it justified? The tendency by some potential customers is to dismiss it as a disingenuous attempt by vendors, especially those in IT, to boost flagging sales. While this suspicion carries a kernel of truth, compelling evidence shows that knowledge management can return impressive results to pharmaceutical and biotech R&D organizations.
What Exactly Is It?

Efforts to pre-empt a SARS outbreak in Australia have spilled from government into the private domain as local IT companies start to adjust work practices to try and keep business running as usual.

Vigilant in the quest to deliver real-time data, BI (business intelligence) and enterprise application vendors are turning to analytic tools in an attempt to energize the supply chain.

Customer relationship management (CRM) in the telecommunications space is all about finding the optimum way of putting information about clients into the hands of employees who are at the front lines -- the call center representatives (CCRs).

United Parcel Service plans to spend US$127 million on global deployment over the next five years of a new driver terminal that features built-in cellular, wireless LAN and Bluetooth short-range wireless systems.

Enterprise application vendors are catching the pervasive-computing bug. Following the porting of enterprise-grade applications to PDAs, advances in network switching technology are paving the way for high-end cellular handsets called smart phones.

The wealthy brokerage houses and financial companies in the heart of Manhattan can buy just about any IT hardware and software they want, so why is Linux gaining users and drawing interest?

No change swept through the IT industry quite so unexpectedly, and so swiftly, as the erosion of Big Consultancy.
At the beginning of 2002 Big Consultancy stood rock solid, one of the three or four great pillars of the IT industry. By the end of last year it had all the appearance of a creature queuing up for registration on the endangered species list.

Betta Stores Limited (BSL), the retail services company behind Betta Electrical and Chandlers retail franchises, is leading a push to streamline supply chain management for the electrical appliance industry.

A new study has revealed that a number of Canadian executives are more willing to partner and share both the risks and rewards with outsourcers. As well, reducing costs -- while still important -- is no longer the driving force behind a company’s decision to outsource services.

When Microsoft Corp. releases its Office 2003 suite in June, several new application bundles will join the Office lineup, including a high-end Professional edition and a new Small Business edition.

U.S. President George W. Bush's top cybersecurity advisor defended his boss's Internet security agenda but called for help from everyone from large corporations to individual Internet users to protect the U.S. homeland by protecting their own little piece of cyber turf.

Having already diversified into the storage and switch markets, Dell Computer Corp. is taking its direct sales approach in yet another new direction: printers.
This week the company unveiled four Dell-branded printers, all made by Lexmark International Inc., for consumer and workgroup use. The company also launched a program for users to buy ink and toner cartridges from the Dell Web site.

Oracle Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison has extolled the virtues of Linux and predicted that the open-source operating system will soon decimate Microsoft Corp. in the battle for the data center market.
"(Microsoft has) already been killed by one open-source product. Slaughtered, wiped out, taken from market dominance to irrelevance," Ellison said, speaking of the Apache Web server's displacement of Microsoft's IIS (Internet Information Services) technology. "They had a virtual monopoly on Web servers, and then they were wiped off the face of the earth. And it's going to happen to them again on Linux."

Two of Europe's largest mobile phone operators have quietly invested in a U.S. software startup developing a new operating system based on Java technology. The investments highlight the growing interest of mobile operators not only to differentiate themselves through customized software but also to decrease their dependence on any one operating system, such as Nokia Corp.'s Series 60 or Microsoft Corp.'s Smartphone.

Cisco Systems Inc. has introduced automated quality-of-service functions for nine of its switches and routers, a move aimed at helping users create converged networks that include voice-over-IP (VOIP) capabilities.
Currently, setting up IP networks with VOIP support often requires IT managers to do complex manual tuning of each router in a LAN or a WAN, said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at The Yankee Group in Boston. The settings are designed to look at IP packets and zip them on their way if they are deemed high priorities, such as voice or video traffic. Because the process is so complex, only 9 percent of companies even turn on quality-of-service functions, Kerravala said. The result, he added, is that some functions, such as VOIP, might not be adopted as widely as they could be.

Return on investment and budget constraints are the biggest roadblocks to convergence projects.
Or so said large corporate customers attending a recent VoiceCon conference, where discussions focused on the business of planning, securing and cost-justifying IP telephony.

This is the year that enterprise IP telephony hits full stride with advanced product features and more large-scale user deployments, experts predict.
Remote-office resiliency, wireless voice over IP, and expanded server platforms and protocol support are some of the items IP PBX users want - and VoIP vendors say customers can expect - in 2003.

Picture this: Instead of having to operate an expensive call center tied to a physical location, you've created a virtual, multimedia contact center staffed by agents working from home or in distant offices, connected through a voice-over-IP network.
You've launched money-saving, self-service customer applications based on standards such as XML and VoiceXML that reduce the load on your agents. You've integrated your CRM software with computer-telephone integration (CTI) so that back-end database information on customers is available to agents in the form of screen pops.