Knowledge management: Utah companies working to harness the intangible.

• Author: Wilhite, Brent
• Position: Techknowledge

CHANCES are, if you've picked up any business publication in the last decade, you've stumbled across the term "knowledge management." On first thought, the phrase seems like an unattainable oxymoron: knowledge is in people's heads--managing it is an impossible task, right? Maybe.

Capturing what workers know may be difficult, but the Information Age is forcing organizations to see knowledge as an asset. You can't ignore it. In today's fast-paced, evolving work place, why would a company neglect the knowledge available from its employees? All those years of experience, sharpened skills, hard-earned insight and intuition, and the personal networks fostered inside and outside of the organization can offer a significant competitive advantage. However, companies risk falling behind their competitors if they aren't quick enough or smart enough to harness this intellectual capital.

"I would say that this is becoming one of the biggest issues facing corporate leaders today: How do they get their arms around intellectual work?" says Doug Harris, co-founder of Engage ThoughtWare, one of Utah's Knowledge Management (KM) companies. "They know that ideas are changing the world, they just don't know how to get to them."

Two Utah companies in the broad KM arena are proving that KM isn't a fleeting business strategy or trendy buzzword. Engage ThoughtWare and SabiOso are attempting to help businesses tap into their most valuable asset--knowledge.

Engage ThoughtWare

The premise for Bountiful-based Engage ThoughtWare began back in the early '90s when Harris asked himself, "How do you get ideas out of people's heads and into the organization, where they can be used?" With the help of his friend and neighbor Matt Cameron, he created a system that promotes idea sharing, offers rewards for those who share knowledge and fosters company-wide communication.

The three-year-old company has been honing its system through a number of beta-testers, including Frontier Airlines, Questar, Altiris and other large corporations. This month, Engage ThoughtWare released its first commercial product, the Engage-ThoughtTree, with a list of companies already lined up to start using the system.

The company's product invites employees to share their ideas, while creating a safe, rewarding environment for them to do so. "In our system, people contribute their ideas anonymously," says Harris. He points out that it's often hard to open yourself to criticism by laying your thoughts and...