Passage 3
These days, retailers are faced with an embarrassment of informational riches. With the right tools, you can track shipments, monitor inventory, gauge customer satisfaction, and much more with the click of a mouse.
And that’s a problem. One of the biggest challenges facing e-business today is information overload. Often buried in the e-mail and faxes, spreadsheets and presentations, browsers and applications, Web sits and data warehouses, is information that holds the key to success. If only you could put your hands on it precisely when you needed it.
Managing information overload and streamlining business processes have become critical success factors that making Knowledge Management (KM) tools vital to e-business success. The following white paper shows how using KM tools to get the right information to the right people at the right time and in a personalized, usable format, can accelerate decision-making, speed business processes, and deliver a decisive e-business advantage.
A variety of stand-alone KM applications are emerging to provide such capabilities. They fall into several categories:
·Information retrieval — Advanced tools let knowledge workers find information quickly, regardless of its source or location.
·Personal content categorization — A single application can be customized to aggregate unstructured data from many sources into one view.
·Learning and adaptation — Behind-the-scenes software agents profile the way an employee works in order to anticipate what data he/she might need.
·Enterprise information portals — Corporate portals pull together up-to-date information and applications to enhance productivity and decision-making.
·Collaboration — Rapid-fire sharing of knowledge among dispersed knowledge workers saves time and money, and increase productivity.
·E-learning — Delivering the latest training to employees precisely when they need it can best be accomplished online.
Next-generation software promises to integrate multiple KM technologies, to forge even more comprehensive solutions. As KM solutions evolve, they will transform the PC from a personal productivity tool to a knowledge assimilation and Internet productivity platform.
39.It can be inferred from the last paragraph that _________.