KMWorld held a webinar on Feb. 23 to review the evolution of KM. The panelists were Stéphan Donzé (AODocs), Mark Hammer (Bloomfire), David Karandish (Capacity), and Marydee Ojala (Information Today) was the moderator.

A number of buzzwords were thrown around: "intelligent aggregation," "actionability," and more. Karandish was focused on KM for customer service, saying that "a perfect experience means self-service, anticipation, automation, speed, integration, escalation" (SAASIE). Improving the customer's experience is certainly a good business case for KM, but it is not the only one, and we increasingly see the narrower focus in discussions and papers.

Donzé had by far the more strategic view. Because of the pandemic, "we're in the middle of the largest proof-of-concept of working remotely." Sharing documents in the cloud has replaced the meeting room and has been a key enabler of continued economic activity. Companies have wanted to control their information space (lifecycle, metadata, permissions, version control, business process automation) but users want a more open collaborative environment, and companies can no longer prevent them from accessing the cloud tools they want. This speaker also pointed out a second trend: AI has become better than humans at processing natural language or recognizing pictures, which enables the automatic classification and indexing of documents.