ORLANDO, Florida -- The big buzz among the 10,000 Lotusphere attendees this year is Knowledge Management -- the next evolution in groupware.

The first challenge in building a knowledge management system is to collect the data. The goal here is to turn tacit knowledge (the stuff people have in their brains) into explicit knowledge by gathering it and storing it.

There is a famous adage going around the show which goes like "If I knew what I knew I could be 30 percent more profitable'' and I heard one speaker add: "How much more profitable would I be if I knew what the rest of my company knew.'' Internal knowledge management is growing out of the recognition that it was often easier to find data about external clients than internal corporate information. Web Searching has opened a wide variety of tools and protocols that allow for easy searching and retrieval of information.

"Lotus Notes has been knowledge management tool of choice,'' said Michael Zisman, Executive Vice President of Lotus. "What we are trying to do now is acknowledge the whole area in reasonable, intellectual and pragmatic terms, in products we can license and use.'' Lotus has introduced a product called LearningSpace, which is a specific application of knowledge management. They have also made dramatic improvements in version 5.0 to continue to be the KM tool of choice.

Lotus Notes Version 5.0 will add a number of new features to enhance its KM features. There is a new enhanced search engine that allows searches to occur simultaneously across many Notes databases and onto the Internet. The new user interface allows you to mix data, from your favorite Notes database, E-mail Newsgroups, the Internet, and corporate push feeds onto the same screen at the same time. It is kind-of like creating a personal home page within the new Notes client. There is also a person profiles feature that lets the user determine the type of information they like to search for. You get all the advantages you have come to expect with "personalised pages'',with the added bonus that it can include your internal Lotus Notes data.

Groupware is the protocol of KM, and Notes is currently the leader in groupware, but KM is also about the people and the process, not just infrastructure and technology.

"KM is as much about bringing the right people together as creating containers of knowledge,'' says Johnathan Spira, senior managing director of The Basex Group, a NY based research and consulting firm. "With a large global organisation you need to find the right human resources and people not just information.'' Mr. Spira said that for KM to be highly effective there needed to be a "smart subscribe'' where you could register functions and roles of an organization and people and the information would be pushed to the appropriate person. This would help companies move to the next step of "automatic groupware''.

From the first look at Notes 5.0, it is hard to determine if "smart subscribe'' will be included or not. It is however easy to determine that Notes will continue to improve as the premier Groupware product, offering a variety of features and enhancements over its predecessor. These will include dramatic improvements in the user interface, which will allow individuals to better manage the KM process.

Jamie Thain will be taking an in-depth look at Knowledge Management in the March issue of the Bottom Line.