If you're only looking for a Portal, Search, Content, Knowledge, Learning or Business Process automation solution, you're missing the big picture of the enterprise workplace.

Introducing the Emerging Knowledge Enterprise

The graphic above illustrates the four key areas enabled by productivity technology in information-rich enterprises. As you can see, most technologies have a key area of expertise, many are commoditized within their respective niches, while others look to add, bolt-on or acquire new technology to expand their reach. The Contextware platform is a breakthrough approach to meeting the demands of the entire knowledge enterprise, while at the same time augmenting and extracting greater value from existing IT investments.

How do we directly compare to the above niche technologies? Although many vendors address aspects of enterprise productivity, few are as broadly applicable, and none as easy and simple to implement and use. So, ignoring for a moment the constant expanding, contracting and rebranding of software companies, the bottom line comparison looks like this:

Want more detail? Read on...

What is Contextware?
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Learn more about
the strengths and
weaknesses of:

Portals
Search
Content Management
Knowledge Management
E-learning
Learning Management Systems
Business Process Management
Workflow

   Portal (and Intranets)

The real problem with portals is that they are an attempt to fit a round peg into a square hole. They are World Wide Web metaphors, relying on such notions as content aggregation and filtering, push and search to reference information. They are information or content-centric, just like the Web.

But businesses don't just reference content. Businesses consume, transform and create content, among many other more tangible things. Businesses are transactional, they exist to produce goods and services for less than the market will bear, with that slim difference something known as profit. The less able they are to increase that difference, the less effective the organization. Transactions involve all dimensions of an organization — strategy, people, processes, information and applications.

Bottom line — portals try to deliver the "what" of business. Contextware looks and acts like your business — we deliver the what, and the who, why and how.

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So what's a "process" portal?

"Process" Portals are more label than reality, the notion of using documented processes as a way to provide context to portal features (portlets, search, etc.). An excellent notion, really. However, no portal vendor provides adequately usable toolsets for documenting knowledge-rich processes.

Only Contextware does, and only Contextware uses process as the means for building the underlying information taxonomy.

   Search Engines

Web search engines rely heavily on linkages between websites to rank content value in addition to page title, meta tags and keyword indexing. This linkage ranking metric is simply not relevant for businesses (unless you have many Web servers hosting internal content, in which case you have bigger problems). Your business is not the internet, not everything stored has value.

You have a finite universe of content relevant to what you do. The problem with internal search engines is that the more they index, the more noise your employees must wade through to find those few useful nuggets. So now, instead of wasting time searching through shared drives on the network, employees scroll through page after page of search results, eventually finding what they need.

Contextware provides a business point of view into organizational content, so employees simply navigate to the task they want to perform, review the task, then instantly access the precisely relevant information.

No searching required.

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   Content Management
(CMS, ECMS)

We do the reverse — we start with your business and drill down to the content, allowing you to easily capture, in precise detail, what your employees need to do their jobs — so they already have the best information right at their fingertips.

And regarding taxonomies, with Contextware, the content taxonomy is built automatically as business processes are documented. Quickly, and painlessly.

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Fun with CMS vendors:

Do a google on Content Management Software then dig a few years back into the press archives of the self proclaimed leaders. You'll find that most CMS vendors got their start as Document Management, and some even go back to Document Imaging.

   Knowledge Management (KM)

To learn more, we
highly recommend:
Working Knowledge

Managing Knowledge:
   A Practical Web-
   Based Approach

There are two distinct approaches to Knowledge Management; tacit and explicit. The Explicit approach generally results in thick procedure manuals, while the Tacit approach is rich in ambiguity, thus attractive to legions of consultants in that deliverables tend to be vague and intangible — and never-ending. Most software to support both approaches are generally similar to Content Management (above) in that they rely on "search" as primary navigation.

Contextware makes tacit knowledge explicit. By using business process logic as the foundation for a rigorous and disciplined authoring environment to capture expertise, Contextware instantly turns tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge as it is captured from subject matter experts, then shares the knowledge across the enterprise. We eliminate ambiguity, reduce consulting costs, and get employees more productive sooner.

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More on Contextware's Knowledge Management Solution

   e-Learning

E-learning is a delivery mechanism. Most e-learning solutions focus on repurposing existing course and training materials so they can be delivered more conveniently to a broader audience via the Internet. Where most e-learning systems fail, but Contextware excels, is in improving the quality of information delivered. The few e-learning solutions that do offer authoring tools are focused on content formatting (color, font size, etc.), not content robustness.

Contextware brings a business process rigor and discipline to capturing training knowledge, making it clearly and completely realized, so the learning experience is delivered with maximum impact. And, since Contextware delivers right to the desktop, on demand, employees can learn and grow while engaging in revenue producing activities.

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More on Contextware's Real Time Learning Solution

   Learning Management Systems (LMS, LCMS)

LMS software "administers" training. It enables HR personnel and department heads to set notification "rules" (alerts and triggers) around employee training requirements, then tracks employee skills, competencies and compliance over time. This is important in highly regulated industries. The problem is LMS complexity quickly becomes cumbersome in high value, knowledge-rich activities, where the goal is to transfer and scale best practices consistently, not just to track and test (though LMS vendors will claim otherwise as they try to swim upstream in an increasingly commoditized market — just ask 'em to "open up the kimono" if you need proof of just how complex they truly are).

An LMS can only provide an instance of training. And delivery of a curriculum over time doesn't really solve the problems encountered by employees operating on a day-to-day basis. Workers require access to information in real time, at the point of the activity, not just within a test and compliance regime.

Our solution lets you set rules around your entire business, not just your employees. We deliver your business information to the right person, at the right place and time, allowing you to dynamically communicate and even track how and when employees interact with processes, information and technology that play a role in their jobs. This is a much richer, more useful and flexible view into the enterprise then simply knowing when the next test date will be.

Another major drawback of LMS software is the severity and complexity of the administration toolset. Contextware? Two simple screens are all you need to know to be able connect people with the processes and business information they need to learn and do their jobs.

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More on Contextware's Real Time Learning Solution

 Business Process Management (BPM) software

To learn more, we
highly recommend:
Business Process   Management (BPM):
  The Third Wave

If the technology that supports your business infrastructure, such as ERP, SCM, CRM and SFA systems, isn’t impacting productivity the way you expected, then perhaps BPM software is for you. BPM software can help you define then automate the precise flow of data between software systems. And, unlike "home grown" solutions, it brings a consistency to the programming and logic so that it can scale over time.

The problem with BPM is its obvious limitation — only 10-20% of organizational processes are potential candidates for automation. The rest are human interactions — the execution of manual and knowledge-rich expert or "intellectual" processes. BPM simply can't help you there (though vendors may claim otherwise as they try to swim upstream in an increasingly commoditized market). Their toolsets are too complex, their methodologies too limited (built to model granular "data flows," not broad process views that incorporate the many information-rich dimensions of a process) and they don't easily integrate and connect to ad hoc, referential information sources.

Our solution was built from the ground up specifically to capture, communicate and enable knowledge processes that are rich in human interaction. While capturing your processes we simultaneously build, reuse and improve on a system-wide information taxonomy. This distinctive approach allows users to not only capture a clear picture of how to perform specific business activities, but also connects them to information, including the technology, content, people, and rules that have a role in those activities.

And, unlike BPM, which by its nature has a limited audience of users, Contextware’s intuitive design promotes use across the entire extended enterprise including employees, customers and partners, providing previously unimagined impact on productivity and insight into opportunities for continuous improvement.

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More on Contextware's Business Process Management Solution

 Workflow software?

First, tell us what you mean by workflow. Thought so — truth is, everyone seems to want workflow software, but they don't truly know what it is. What people really mean is they either want to automate a highly granular activity ("send form around for approval," for example) or they want to document how they do business (see process modeling).

So let's understand workflow a little better — true "workflow" is a business process constrained by business rules that has automated triggers and routing. A rule would be "Supervisor must review application", so the work "flow" would not allow you to move to the next task until the supervisor actually approved the application. So you click through a series of screens, one task at a time, until the flow is completed.

Most software that claims to offer "workflow" at best allows you to tag content with a requirement of some kind, but does not enforce it and does not offer a toolset that captures the big picture from one application to another (relying instead on APIs). And true workflow software requires substantial IT support, is cumbersome and confusing to manage and use, and works best with functional, non-expert immutable processes (like manufacturing), certainly not the knowledge-rich processes Contextware excels at managing.

Contextware is a rich best practices environment. We help you we capture business processes and relevant information, then communicating the documented processes to critical audiences, and at the same time, capture user actions that provide real insight into your business so you can improve, or "reengineer" your processes in real time.

After all, you can't have "workflow" if you don't yet understand your "work."

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Fun with workflow vendors:

Do a google on BPM, then dig a few years back into the press archives of the self proclaimed leaders. You'll find that most BPM vendors got their start as Workflow, but then evolved (read: "rebranded").