"This is where KM has been moving for the past four or five years," says Sara Radicati, president of research firm Radicati Group. "A good KM solution will be able to connect manuals online to people that may be online and available quickly."

Scalable KM

No matter how these separate portals are integrated, they mark the biggest test yet of the KM concept. Most KM projects are limited to fewer than 5,000 users, says analyst Radicati. Even in big companies like Ford, the emphasis typically is on KM at the workgroup, not enterprisewide, she says. Yet interest in knowledge management has waned lately because of the amount of time and money these projects consume. "To most people, it seems like a frill," Radicati says.

Still, private businesses can learn a lot from the Navy, particularly about navigating around resistance from higher-ups, Bertsch says. "When obstacles get in the way and when somebody refuses to change, or they are dragging their feet and are hurting the organization, then you must move them out of the way," he says.

But his biggest lesson is to put up something, anything, that will produce early returns and make an impact quickly. Don't insist on making it perfect. "It's ready, aim, fire. Not ready, aim, aim, aim," Bertsch says.

On the Horizon

Looking forward, the NKO team faces challenges. They'll have to fight what Bertsch calls a "guerrilla war" to secure permanent funding and attain legitimacy among the Navy's senior ranks. (Morris assures that next year's NKO budget will be significantly higher than this year's, though he wouldn't say by how much because of pending negotiations with Appian.)

Usability also is an issue. Some users call for better categorization and grouping of content. They say it's hard to find your way through NKO's mostly text navigation system. Also, the Enterprise Collaboration Center, where documents are uploaded and shared and whose interface resembles Windows Explorer's files and folders, doesn't integrate well enough with the channels that sailors use to customize the look of their pages, Preissler says. And links to documents that relate to topical channels have to be entered manually.

On the technical side, the storage infrastructure will have to become more distributed as a more geographically dispersed work force signs onto NKO. The problem is acute aboard naval vessels, which have low-bandwidth network connections. Caching alone won't solve the problem, because information is so specialized that it's nearly impossible to anticipate what to cache locally.

NKO also has to prove it can do more than sign up a lot of users and host chats. Admiral Moran and others say the ultimate goal is to improve fleet readiness. How exactly that will be measured and whether NKO can even accomplish its mission in any demonstrable way remains an open question Short-term metrics include better retention of users, lower training costs and the ability to train sailors while they're aboard ships rather than bringing them back to the classroom.

"The Navy is pretty good at measuring short-term goals," O'Dell says. "But I don't see how they will measure fleet readiness."

In her recent study of 29 organizations using knowledge management, the major difference between those organizations that achieved high returns on their KM investments and those that didn't was how clear they were about the way in which the ultimate goal would be measured. (The median annual expense was $6.4 million, and O'Dell estimates the 12-month ROI to be $15 million among this group, with no ROI difference between the first year and subsequent years.)

"Clarity about where you are going helps you get there," O'Dell says. "It's easy to get caught up in the activity measures. They need to keep their eye on the ball."

For more on how the Navy build NKO and why it choose to partner with Appian, see "Do It Cheap, Do It Now".

David Joachim is Network Computing's editor/business technology. Write to him at djoachim@nwc.com.