Knowledge management is the new industry buzzword.

In today’s fast-changing global markets, success is no longer tied to the traditional inputs of labor, capital or land. The new critical resource is inside the heads of employees: knowledge. What a company knows — and how it leverages that knowledge — has never been more essential for success. Suddenly, it seems, everyone is talking about “knowledge management.”

Lotus customers have been “doing” knowledge management for some time.

But knowledge management is nothing new. It’s a different label applied to something that Lotus has been working on for years: how best to help people share and leverage their expertise. It’s no accident that the companies at the forefront of this “new” discipline — companies like Buckman Labs, Monsanto Life Sciences, Andersen Consulting and British Petroleum — have chosen Lotus Notes as their knowledge platform. Frankly, we wish we’d thought of the term “knowledge management” ourselves. It’s more exciting — and more descriptive of what we do — than “groupware.”

Knowledge management seems to have some common critical success factors.

Terminology notwithstanding, we’ve learned a lot over the years about how to succeed at knowledge management. For one thing, many companies try to do too much. We’ve found that the biggest payback comes when a company maps its knowledge management efforts — its knowledge strategy — to a key aspect of its business strategy. For most companies, that means focusing on one or more of the following four areas:

Specific business goals — innovation, responsiveness, productivity and competency — lend themselves well to knowledge management activities.

Innovation — Finding and nurturing new ideas, bringing people together in “virtual” development teams, creating forums for brainstorming and collaboration.

Responsiveness — Giving people access to the information they need when then need it, so they can solve customer problems more quickly, make better decisions faster, and respond more quickly to changing market conditions.

Productivity — Capturing and sharing best practices and other reusable knowledge assets to shorten cycle times and minimize duplication of effort.

Competency — Developing the skills and expertise of employees through on-the-job, online training, and “distance” learning.

Lotus Notes has been a powerful platform for solutions in these areas.

Lotus Notes enables each of these critical knowledge management solutions. Notes provides a single infrastructure — a foundation on which a company can build,

integrate and link all of its knowledge management applications. Notes is the

knowledge platform.

Lotus has learned much about how to make its products more likely to con- tribute to successful knowledge management efforts.

But even a great knowledge management system will fail if no one uses it. Much has been written about the challenge of getting people to share knowledge and change their long-held behaviors. We’ve learned that people will share what they know and reuse the know-how of others if you make it easy for them, and if you make it worth their while. We’ve also learned that knowledge is often as much about who you know as it is about what you know. By integrating our insights into our products, and working closely with IBM to extend and deepen our solution set, we’re helping to ensure that good knowledge management is the norm for our customers, not the exception.