Here's how opencola describes their P2P approach to enterprise knowledge management...
Inefficient search and the resultant rework costs billions.
According to the Meta Group, workers spend approximately 25-35% of their time searching for the information they need, rather than working on strategic projects and business opportunities. IDC states that Fortune 500 companies will lose $31.5 billion by 2003 due to rework and the inability to find information.
Search breaks down because it can't find distributed information
The Delphi Consulting Group has found that only 12% of a typical company's knowledge is explicitly published. The remaining 88% is distributed knowledge, which is comprised of employees' personal knowledge. This knowledge is captured by their work-in-progress Office® documents, e-mail, web sites they visit, and the searches they perform. Knowledge workers are in a constant process to keep their own personal knowledge and knowledge relationships current. However there are limited tools to perform this personal knowledge gathering well, and even worse, some companies are trying to solve the problem of what somebody knows by automatically profiling them - a solution that Opencola does not support.
Opencola® is a distributed solution for distributed information
Instead of auto-profiling, Opencola provides the knowledge worker with a powerful desktop tool that allows them to automate the collection and management of information. Once organized and automated, people can easily share folders with their team and the enterprise. The ability to create local folders of information on topics that the user already tracks and automatically find other people who have relevant information, is a powerful motivator to use the tool. When the time comes to share information, it can easily be shared from desktop to desktop via the secure peer-to-peer network easing the friction of uploading information to a central repository.
