Credit crunching IT

Well, it didn't take long did it? Green IT has already been toppled as the topic on everyone's lips in the technology industry, just as compliance before it. Now every vendor, every services organisation, every analyst is talking about what CIOs should be doing, buying and saying in the "current economic climate". Some of it is of course, spurious rubbish, but other advice makes a little more sense.
Former European head of security at IBM, Nick Coleman, for example, predicted a massive restructuring in the security industry as capacity is reached on staff numbers and firms look to cut back. And then everyone's favourite analyst behemoth, Gartner, came out with all guns blazing. IT leaders must not be shy, it said, they must grasp the nettle by the horns, or some such metaphor, and embrace transformational change projects.
Now, if we're talking about near mission critical applications which could make or break your reputation as CIO, enterprise search is probably somewhere up there. So it was no surprise last week that Jean Ferre, chief executive of French-based search firm Sinequa, was waxing lyrical about his firm's products and their ability to help you out in the current economic climate. When you think about it, he's kind of right when he says that one of the few assets your organisation has that won't depreciate is your talent, your human resources. The only problem is that the knowledge locked away in their brain holes can't easily be tapped.
Which is where knowledge management tools of old were meant to help. Trouble is they were universally panned as unwieldy, hard to use, and thus largely failed. Newer firms like Trampoline Systems are making a good stab of reinventing the area, allowing firms to manage projects by mapping out the relationships their staff have with each other, and with the information they deal with on a daily basis.
Coming at it from a slightly different angle, Sinequa's 'thing' is that it allows users to search for corporate documents according to who is mentioned in them, or who has authored them. It can be tremendously helpful to be able to pull out this kind of information, especially dealing in an enterprise context, because reading a document is often not enough - you'll also need to ask someone who can offer insight about that document, talk through what you need to talk through, and then make your informed decision.
That's the idea anyway. I haven't used it yet, but the demo seemed pretty smooth and, in these oh so trying times, you could do worse than looking for ways to maximise staff productivity, break down silos, increase efficiency and so on.