A growing number of organizations are using service
portfolio management (SPM) — a methodology borrowed from the investment
industry — to reduce IT costs, speed up decision making, and better
align IT projects with strategic objectives. This article tells how SPM
works and why it has the potential to change how knowledge professionals
define their roles and standards of excellence. See also "Valuing
knowledge services" roundtable, June 13, The Mitre Corporation.
This month's entries include articles on how to do
portfolio management, a graphical representation of how IT contributes
to enterprise value, how to get data from an accounting program and a
credit card statement into an Excel spreadsheet, and why Google is more
than just a search engine.
ROUNDTABLES & SEMINARS
Search engine + knowledge base (Teleconference,
May 17, 2006)
Metadata is everywhere. The problem is that it may
not be complete, up-to-date, in the right place, or in the right format
— a drain on productivity for enterprises, work groups, and individuals.
In this roundtable, Montague Institute Founder Jean Graef describes
how her organization uses a metadata repository along with integration
tools and techniques to increase the productivity of researchers, analysts,
authors, editors, and other users.
How do you explain fuzzy concepts like "knowledge
management" and abstractions like "ontology" to non-IT
managers in cost/benefit terms? How do you attract sufficient resources
to do innovative projects? How do you get business unit managers to
share the responsibility for formulating and apply metadata standards
and creating high quality content? In this roundtable, at IT manager
and a knowledge manager from the MITRE Corporation will kick off the
discussion by telling how they have implemented "service portfolio
management."
Metadata & search
(Face-to-face seminar, June 14, 2006, Bedford, MA)
Learn how to create and maintain metadata structures
(taxonomies) and expose them for use by a metadata-aware search engine
such as Autonomy's Ultraseek. As an option, you can create your own
metadata using a Web-based Lab and experiment with search engine interface
functions. Lab includes individual mentoring for IT/content teams.
Links to the 20 most popular articles on this site
based on last month's server statistics.
COURSES The following courses in the Knowledge
Base Publishing series can be taken on site or over the Web with individual
mentoring and a hands-on Lab.
