Yakabod has been providing knowledge management solutions since 2003. It was founded in 2001 by CEO Scott Ryser and CTO Scott Williamson and first focused on web applications. I recently spoke with Scott Ryser and Chris Coleman, their EVP for Marketing. The firm is headquartered in the DC area and their main clients have been in the US Federal government’s intelligence community.
Yakabod’s flagship product is the Yakabox™ Knowledge Network. It is built to meet Protection Level 3 standards for software used in the U.S. Intelligence Community. It is a secure knowledge-sharing system that enables organizations more control over their content and allows for secure collaboration, both internally and with their business partners. I feel even more importantly it provides the users with great control and flexibility in how they manage content relevant to their work. It is activity based rather than based on taxonomies and file structures isolated from daily work processes. With the release of Yakabox 3.0 they are plan to engage a broader market outside the intelligence community.
Scott and I discussed the importance of activity based knowledge management. I was already onboard with the concept, as all the successful KM systems that I have seen have been work process-based, rather than standalone knowledge repositories. Scott pointed out that 80% of knowledge management efforts fail primarily because of cultural barriers. I believe this and I imagine most of these failures are not work process centric.
Scott mentioned that with transactional applications you can force people to input data as part of their job. However, you miss the large amounts of useful unstructured data around these transactions. If the system for unstructured data is not part of the work process it is hard to get people to engage. A knowledge system that is aligned with work transactions is more likely to pick up this content.
As McKinsey wrote a few years ago, the real value in companies is now in the interactions rather than the transactions, but IT has largely supported the latter. Now more investment needs to be made in supporting the interactions and making them accessible. This is the goal of Yakabox.
If you make the knowledge management system aligned with work processes you have gone a log way to handling the adoption issue. Next, you have to add value to the work process. Yakabox makes the user the center of knowledge sharing and enables them to find content useful and relevant to their work. You can designate content as relevant on a 1 to 5 scale. These ratings drive other relevance algorithms and the systems learns from your actions.
Scott said that when they added the relevance engine to the system, adoption exploded. People now had content come to them that was helpful and spent less time looking for stuff. You can also tag it and make comments for others to see. Yakabox provides fine-grained control over who can see these comments and ratings so people are less hesitant to share, knowing that this information goes to a selected subset of the broader audience with the organization. Scott said that these controls help to build trust and people frequently expand who can see what they do as this trust develops. This way silos can be broken down piece by piece.
The system integrates four applications—collaboration, social networking, content management and search—on one secure platform. It is delivered three ways: an appliance (bundled hardware and software installed behind the client’s firewall), on-site subscription (no hardware/software purchase), or hosted (SaaS with no per-user fees).
Scott gave me a tour. You start with the Activity Viewer page and content is organized around your activities. The top of the widest column contains the “road blocks” you are responsible for. These are the items where your team is dependent on your actions to move a project or initiative forward. Underneath the roadblocks are items organized by recency. Since your rate items on a 1 - 5 scale you can also filter them down by only showing items that meet your designated criteria. You can apply this rating scale to content, people, blogs, and any other item within the system.
For each item you can learn more about the people or topic. You can leave a comment and go to the profile of each person involved. You can go to the home page of every person to see what each is doing. These home pages are not limited to people as you can go to the home page of document and see all the actions around it. You can also see the objects that are generating the most activity.
There is a Twitter like status update field where you can answer the question, “what are you doing that matters.” I think that within the enterprise status updates like this work better within a system such as Yakabox, than as a standalone application like Twitter. I feel the opposite about the Web where I think Twitter status updates work better than those within a system like Facebook. You can set up a TweetDeck like interface to see the actions of people you want to follow and apply the 1-5 rating scale to determine the number of people you see at any one time.
There are robust access and dissemination controls over content. They can be role-based or individual-based. You can add filters to the search function to look at things such as only documents, only people, or even only documents by a certain person. You can add a “see also” link to provide access to additional material related to any content. This allows you to first narrow down and then expand the content you look at while keeping things relevant.
Yakabox also provides a blog tool where you can post in the context of the complete system. The same access controls can be applied as well as the search and relevancy filters. There is also a calendar with these same filters. In addition to the features that come out of the box you can add more. I think that Yakabox provides the right balance of control, features, relevance, and ease of use for an enterprise 2.0 style knowledge management system. It will be interesting see how it doe sin the broader business market.
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