Strategic: Military Works With What It KnowsStrategic: Military Works With What It Knows

Knowledge management is emerging as a key strategic practice for individual branches of the U.S. military. And work in the past two years at the U.S. Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego might yield a system that could be used for knowledge sharing across the armed forces.

The project team is building an engine for capitalizing on shared knowledge for the Navy's Fleet Information Warfare Center, which develops IT tools to help sailors in combat and to defend against computer attacks.

The center of its knowledge-management effort is software from a small Silicon Valley company called Entopia Inc. The Navy is customizing Entopia's Quantum application to extend collaboration, which now happens mostly via E-mail, so naval personnel can find experts and publish knowledge, and use the software's semantic search capabilities across a variety of sources.

The Navy expects to produce a knowledge engine for training and deployment preparations. For instance, sailors on a battleship moving from the southern shores of India to the eastern coast of Africa could gather information from the ship it's replacing without waiting for an E-mail response. Military uses of knowledge management often face fewer obstacles than corporate deployments, says Kent Greenes, senior VP and chief knowledge officer for research and engineering consultancy Scientific Applications International. They don't face the same profit-return goals, and they benefit from more of a team-oriented culture compared with the "what's-in-it-for-me" corporate mentality, Greenes says.

Eventually, the Quantum engine could help satisfy defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld's desire to see a more unified information architecture in the military by linking the Navy's databases with those of the Air Force, Army, and Marines. "Quantum could be used as a standard military knowledge base," says Hiekeun Ko, the Navy's principal investigator for the project. "It smartly integrates everything, cost effectively."

The server software costs just $25,000, Ko says, much less than basic configurations of more-established applications.

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Illustration by Terry Miura