The Many Flavors of Knowledge Management

Different knowledge management tools provide different functionality, and often organizations will deploy more than one type of technology, depending on their needs. One broad category of knowledge management tools analyzes links between information. Tools in this category include those from ClearForest Corp. of New York,

Attensity Corp. of Salt Lake City, and Las Vegas-based Systems Research & Development. Another category of tools analyzes and classifies unstructured data and includes those from Stratify Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., and Inxight Software Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif.

Other tools provide more specialized knowledge management features. One example is the tool set from Tacit Knowledge Systems of Palo Alto, Calif., which helps coordinate connections among people who may have relevant information. It identifies subject-matter experts by looking for patterns in information. Another example is SiteProfiler from Digital Sandbox of Reston, Va. Tools like this help organizations determine how to prioritize threats. A local government, for example, might use it to ascertain whether the risk of a truck bomb is a higher priority than preparing for a biological attack, explains Anthony Beverina, chief operating officer of Digital Sandbox.