(Copyright © 2002 T Bruce Tober)
During a previous incarnation, the author sold some of the first sets of the ISYS Text Retrieval program back in 1988. Back then it was advertised as a Text Retrieval (TR) program and took some selling since few understood the difference between TR and a word processor's "find" command - and no one had heard of Knowledge Management (KM).
The program's inventor, original programmer and the founder and MD of the company which still owns and distributes the program, Ian Davies, talks about the program's role in KM. Davies founded the company, Odyssey Development, in 1988. It is, as it always has been, headquartered in Sydney, Australia and has added corporate offices in the US and the UK.
CommunitySpace: Where did the idea for ISYS come from?
Ian Davies: At the time I was doing some freelance consulting. Part of what I did in that capacity was to find products for people. I had a couple of clients who needed text retrieval. I was familiar with the mainframe TR program called Status. While it was powerful, it was too hard to use. I was able to find some TR programs for the PC but while they were pretty, they had these ridiculous limitations such as only being able to handle 1000 files, and though they were really fast on small documents, they slowed up tremendously on larger ones. That's useless.
So I saw there was a place in the market for a TR product that looked good, but was fast, reliable and had large capacity, while also being easy to use. So I developed ISYS.
CommunitySpace: What took ISYS from being a Text Retrieval program to being a KM Information Retrieval (IR) system?
ID: Initially, ISYS just indexed text residing in documents, and we described it as a TR system. But over the past 13 years it's expanded to more than just TR. It's grown to include graphical images through the addition of a scanning and OCR engine. And it now covers external Web sites, e-mail, SQL data and proprietary OEM data.
So when the term Knowledge Management appeared, we realised that that's what we've been doing all these years. We just didn't call it that.
What KM preaches is what we've always preached, which is that there is value in anything anyone creates. So let's not just use it and throw it away. Instead, let's capture that knowledge so we'll be able to reuse it at some point.
Without doing this an organization experiences a creeping corporate amnesia. As people leave or get promoted, what they know disappears. When that happens a company is condemned to continually solving the same problems and discovering the same information. Or to acting without full information.
The big difference is that it wasn't called Knowledge Management back then. Our products have grown and had more knowledge-related features added to them over time, but the fundamental objective of releasing value from existing knowledge is unchanged.
From a marketing perspective, having a tag or name that applies to what we do is a very handy thing. It also means KM is more of an issue on people's agenda. They know KM is a good thing to practice, and we don't have to first convince them of that. So about two years ago we started using the term Knowledge Management when talking about ISYS.