Content personalization
A project document could be used as a discovery document to retrieve other documents like it. For example, you could point to a relevant document and ask the system to search for documents that are similar to it and then map the routing of search results to a select list of user profiles based on similarity of document knowledge signatures to user profile. In addition, the content of the routed results could be automatically personalized by mapping compartmentalized document content, itself mapped to the document signature, by cross-mapping them to each user's profile to whom respective documents were routed on a personalized basis.

When you have document content focused on individual needs, you can more quickly grasp the meaning of documents as it relates to the problem context from your individual perspective. This will allow you to arrive at decisive decisions faster. Organizing document content around the problem context also provides powerful decision support.

A technology whose time has come
Years ago, management gurus like Peter Drucker wrote that, as managers, we should take the last hour of the day to look out the window to think about how we were going to run the business better tomorrow. That was before information technology ran over us, burying us deep in a heap of irrelevant, unorganized infoglut.

No one has the time today to manually sift through and organize the remnants of valuable information lost in a rubble of infoglut. Few of us have the speed-reading skills and even fewer have the power-reading skills required to cope with assimilating even a fraction of the volumes that flood our in-baskets, application reports, and network searches. As a result, business-critical information goes missing-in-action. Its power lies trapped beneath the surface in an unorganized deluge of unstructured infoglut that our systems and technologies keep pouring on us on a daily basis.

Smart content is a technology whose time has come. Wouldn't it be great to have smart content working for us under-the-covers, sifting through the rubble to bring valuable information nuggets to the surface based on problem context, and organizing content around how we work, think, and learn? We can finally begin to dig out from under IT's Catch-22 spin, where we drown if we imbibe and starve if we don't. With smart content extending workspace portals into smart portals, the benefits of smart searching, smart profiling, smart routing, and smart learning will just keep getting better as adaptive knowledge management technology dynamically builds and leverages cognitive maps to help us become more knowledgeable and get better at what we do.

Bain McKay is an Executive Vice President of CORedge Software, Inc. and Chief Scientist with Knowledge Management Technology, CIRI Lab and activeIntranet, plc. Bain can be reached at bmckay@tsg.com or at http://www.tsg.com.