State of the Knowledge Management market in Israel

In the past several years, KM (Knowledge Management) projects have been given a “bad name” and were associated with failure, lack of integration, and no ROI. Recently, Israeli KM project managers and CKOs (Chief Knowledge Officers) have been trying to come up with new ways for making KM work – new implementation methodologies, new approached, and most are now trying to target specific processes in which KM services can be embedded successfully. In our opinion, KM is becoming more process-dependent and in order to be successfully integrated, KM services should be combined in every-day tasks. We see less and less mega KM projects “just for the sake of KM”. There has to be a specific need, process, and business owner.

I have been talking to many enterprises lately regarding their KM initiatives; There's no doubt that this trend of combining KM within day-to-day processes is a desired goal for most organizations. Timing and context are very important – providing the right piece of information to the right person at the right time, and within the right context is key.
Another hot topic lately for Israeli CKOs is the web 2.0 dilemma. CKOs are wondering, if and how they can implement web 2.0 concepts and tools within the organization boundaries to improve knowledge creation and sharing (Enterprise 2.0).

Much of this interest can be associated with the failure of traditional very centrally managed models. Since the old model is associated with many of the KM failures, organizations are trying to use new models that are almost the opposite of the traditional ones.

Here are some of the main differences:
Traditional KM: Expensive, IT-dependent, complex
Web 2.0 KM: Cheap, simple to set up, run and use

Traditional KM: Top-Bottom, Centrally Managed, controlled
Web 2.0 KM: Bottom-up, decentralized, not “controlled”

Traditional KM: “The larger the org - the harder it gets”
Web 2.0 KM: The larger – the more “searchable”

We estimate that about a third of Israeli enterprises are piloting web 2.0 for internal KM or planning to do so soon. However, there are also many difficulties that can arise in this approach: First, it is not easy turning employees into bloggers, taggers, wikiers. Another factor here is that those who have the most valuable knowledge have the least spare time. We have also seen that organizations are having a very hard time determining the right degree of control over the content creation. Since there is so little experience in Israel with this area, best practices are hard to find, and understanding in which cases these concepts work better than the traditional model and vice versa is very difficult and almost looked upon as a “trial and error”.

Additional popular areas are ECM (Enterprise Content Management), enterprise search, and the use of enterprise portals for KM needs.
Enterprise Search is also a hot topic for large enterprises in Israel in the past year. Several of them are now piloting a few solutions. Up until recently, this was not a very active market in Israel, since prices were higher than what companies were willing to pay for enterprise search. The combination between price decreases, market consolidation and maturity, and the entrance of new, cheaper options to Israel (Google enterprise, Microsoft’s MOSS) led to a lot of interest in this area.