Knowledge Powered by People™ is Paying Off for Tomoye and Its Customers Everywhere
November 12, 2002
Ottawa CANADA, Tomoye Corporation, a leading provider of software solutions for collaborative knowledge sharing, today announced the availability of Tomoye Simplify 3.0, and tells the tale of their success since the first commercial release of their product in July, 2001.
"We had a grass-roots vision for making knowledge management really work for organizations by putting the power to share in the hands of the people with the knowledge," says Greg Searle, CTO and Co-Founder of Tomoye and an authority on guerrilla knowledge management. "Our whos who line-up of customers is proving that our vision was right on target." Tomoyes customers today include demanding and progressive organizations like the US Government, the Canadian Government, the United Nations and the World Bank.
How Communities of Practice Work
The way people make better decisions in their day-to-day job is to connect with peers inside and outside of their organizations to share ideas, find best practices, learn from each other, consult experts, have focused conversations, and align tasks to business objectives.
These groups or networks of peers with a common domain of expertise and a shared set of goals are Communities of Practice (CoP). And although knowledge-sharing communities like these are as ancient as human history, it is only recently that their characteristics and needs have been studied in detail particularly with reference to systems and technologies that can help them generate strategic rewards for the organizations that cultivate them. While the applications and tools on their desktop dont allow them to do that easily except through the ineffective methods like email, telephone conversations and the occasional meeting Tomoye Simplify provides an online practice centre and set of tools for members of the same practice to reach out to each other across organizational boundaries.
Driving Business Results
"Communities of Practice are one of the most effective ways for connecting people with the knowledge they need to deliver on business strategy," states Dr. Etienne Wenger. "No organization that is serious about competing in a knowledge economy should overlook their strategic value." Dr. Wenger is an internationally renowned thought leader in the area of Communities of Practice and their application to business problems. He is the author of several books on the subject, including Cultivating Communities of Practice (Harvard Business School Press, 2002).
Global organizations such as the World Bank, the US Government, British Petroleum and Daimler Chrysler are making substantial investments in Communities of Practice as their response to rapid change and competitive marketplaces. Some of Tomoyes customers are engineering better farm implements in the American mid-west, developing more responsive inter-governmental policies and treaties, and bringing the know-how of global resources together to reduce the impact of HIV/AIDS in Africa. By using a Tomoye practice center, they are finding better solutions, making fewer mistakes, reducing duplication of efforts, learning from their successes, delivering on strategic business objectives in essence, shortcutting their path to better business results.
The International Development Research Center of Canada (IDRC/CDRI) is responsible for helping communities in the developing world find solutions to social, economic, and environmental problems through research. One of IDRCs challenges is to bring the research groups they fund together to share research results, best practices and to reduce duplication of work. One of their websites is home to over 30 such research communities. It is powered by Tomoye Simplify.
Jean-Marc Fleury, IDRCs Director of Communications, says "Our use of Tomoye Simplify is mission critical a public website of over 30 communities with a million webpages viewed each month. We tried other solutions, but we chose Tomoye Simplify because it allowed us to accomplish our business objectives faster, and more cheaply."
Tomoye Simplify 3.0Tomoye Simplify draws the best from many different types of technology - knowledge management, content management, community, and collaboration making the right combination of tools and features needed to build an online practice center for a Community of Practice.
"The product release we are announcing today is the result of very close collaboration with our customers, says Jen Hunter, Director of Customer Success for Tomoye. We have learned so much together about what makes a successful, thriving Community of Practice that magic combination of technology and people."
Much of the new functionality in Tomoye Simplify 3.0 is all about building more successful communities of practice by making it easy for the members to get involved and to stay involved:
- One-click contributions: users can now contribute knowledge to the community with a single click after they log in a significant productivity gain. And they can create their content from within a new WYSIWIG editor that is as familiar as their word processing application.
- Find experts faster: connecting with the right members is at the heart of getting results from community, and dramatically improved with new member search functionality in this release.
- Searchable online discussions: easier access to the life of the community what people are talking about is now possible with a centralized and searchable discussion list that is also available in context, at the topic and knowledge object levels.
- Tighter e-mail integration: a common request from Tomoyes customers, Tomoye Simplify 3.0 allows members to participate in the community from their e-mail inbox by emailing information directly to a practice center topic, and by receiving updates on information that is important through a variety of email notifications and digests.
Tomoye Simplify 3.0 also makes it easier for community leaders to support lively Communities of Practice of 1,000s of members through improved membership management features such as bulk importing, bulk management of email groups and membership lists, portal usage tools that help them measure the activity and growth of their community.
Mike Dorohovich is an independent KM consultant and former Chief Knowledge Management Officer for the U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense for C31. He acknowledges that there are many good platforms for building effective systems for knowledge management and Communities of Practice, but that the real cost of licenses and development efforts in those platforms often begins at 1 million or more, which far exceeds the budget of most organizations with a need. "Tomoye Simplify 3.0 is the one exception I have found with the potential to fit just about any Community of Practice need," says Mike. "It has the right features, it is flexible, it deploys quickly, it is inexpensive, and the company and technology is poised to grow with the demand for CoPs in the U.S. Government. In the case of our Program Management Community of Practice (PMCoP), replacing our existing platform with Tomoye Simplify easily shortened the development cycle by 12 months and significantly reduced the development staff necessary for the project."
"We are proud to be partners with such impressive customers," says John Mertl, Tomoye President CEO. "Our work with these organizations is helping to shape an emerging market that is solving one of the most critical business problems of our times capturing and using tacit organizational knowledge. Our growth is on track and we are exceptionally excited about the future."
Pricing and AvailabilityTomoye Simplify 3.0 is immediately available through Tomoye Corporations account managers who can be contacted at +1 (819) 246-9007 ext. 315, or at sales@tomoye.com. About Tomoye Corporation
Tomoye helps leaders in knowledge-intensive organizations worldwide make the most of their collective know-how by building better Communities of Practice.
The company's flagship product, Tomoye Simplify, offers tools and features designed to foster dynamic, productive Communities of Practice. Rapid deployment, ease of use, de-centralized publishing, and cross-referenced knowledge bases are just a few of the advantages of Tomoye Simplify. Beyond technology, however, Tomoye is an expert in the field of building better Communities of Practice. Tomoye builds a partnership with every customer pairing customer expertise with Tomoye services to create thriving, self-sustaining communities. "Tomoye" is an ancient Japanese symbol used by Shinto priests who knew that Earth was round centuries before Western philosophers came to the same conclusion. It is all about knowing things before your time. Tomoye, the Tomoye symbol, Knowledge Powered by People, and Tomoye Simplify are registered trademarks of Tomoye Corporation.