Some Market Trends for Knowledge Management Solutions

Abstract

Nowadays, especially after the recent financial downturn, companies are looking for much more efficient business processes. They need to better solutions place in the market in a less time with less cost. There is a general intuition that knowledge management or collaboration, especially mixed with Web 2.0 approach within companies and ecosystems, can boost knowledge exploitation and innovation process with positive impacts on financial and market indicators. For many executives, when facing a buying decision for a new knowledge management, collaboration or Web 2.0 based solutions for their companies (sometimes also known as Enterprise 2.0) they need to understand its benefits and investment.

This chapter introduces some insights for the commercialization of knowledge management solutions from technology and marketing point of view. The objective of this chapter is twofold: On the one hand to identify potential challenges in the mid and long-term to boost productivity of knowledge workers in their everyday tasks. On the other hand it aims at pointing out some of the market trends for the next years where productivity and added value already are key for business processes.

Based on some reports, data and forecasts from Forrester Research (http://www.forrester.com), Gartner (http://www.gartner.com), intelligence from some specialists on enterprise 2.0 solutions (http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/doug-miles/1/370/6a0), personal experience deploying projects in large companies (http://semtech2010.semanticuniverse.com/sessionPop.cfm?confid=42&proposalid=2920) and results from the R&D project ACTIVE (http://www.active-project.eu/) this chapter tries to illustrate some important challenges and promising paths to the mainstream market with semantically enabled knowledge management solutions.