The dead document pool
While reading large documents quickly was a skill that baby boomers worked hard to acquire, it's difficult for them to keep up today unless they have mastered the powers of speed-reading, power-reading, and power-learning. The new breed of corporate manager from the Nintendo generation can be seen not only surfing the Internet for instant gratification, but also surfing TV channels in a similar manner. Their music and the events in their lives are always in top gear, making it hard for them to slow down to read large amounts of large documents. As a result, corporations today fail to reuse knowledge beyond its initial capture, thus creating a dead knowledge pool that litters network drives at tremendous opportunity cost.

We all know that "search on steroids" is not the answer. Why serve 10,000 documents in five seconds if we can't assimilate the results, particularly if the first ten are not that relevant? We need to serve users "a few good documents" that are focused on their problem context and organized around their personal knowledge for quick assimilation, so they can arrive at better decisions faster. But how can we get there from here? Read on.

A new generation of knowledge management tools
Fortunately, technology is advancing, as it should, to come to the rescue. There are many who would argue that Information Technology has become a necessity rather than a productive benefit, and there is ample evidence to support this claim. Knowledge Management products to date have delivered the same empty promise: interesting technology that doesn't really help individuals and corporate groups cope with the vast array of dead knowledge pooling in our networks. The need to extract and organize knowledge out of corporate documents and focus it automatically on our problems in our learning style, quickly and effectively, has become an urgent necessity for corporate survival, so we can begin the process of productively harnessing the pools of dead knowledge that we continue to regenerate, rather than reuse.

Activating pools of dead knowledge trapped in corporate documents
Technology exists today that can automatically read corporate documents for you, extracting semantic context patterns to form knowledge signatures, a unary semantic operator that acts as a key to unlock the knowledge contained within the document. While this might seem surprising, there is even more advanced technology that can help corporations climb out of their corporate aliteracy syndrome, so they can begin the trek towards a healthy Knowledge Management environment, rich in its reuse of the knowledge it already has.