The basic benefits that we can bring to vendors of information technology are two fold:

More satisfied customers

According to poll after poll, customers and their users are not happy with most current information technology implementations. Much of the dissatisfaction is directed at search, the technology that users have to have and love to hate. We believe that it is not so much that search is the real culprit, but that it is the component that users interact with and so blame it.

It is often a content management that doesn't incorporate taxonomies or metadata in user oriented ways that shares much of the blame. Or a categorization software that tries to eliminate the human editorial role. Or a portal that sits on top of unstructured information and organizationally defined users.

Software alone is not the answer. Implementing information software without organizing the information is like trying to run a company without organizing the employees. For truly satisfied customers, the software needs to be implemented within a well designed intellectual infrastructure that we can help the customer develop.

More successful customers

Successful customers, customers that implement your software in such a way that the success is immediately apparent to their users and to their executive leadership is the surest path to a successful sale, a repeat sale, and a larger sale.

Customers that view the software in the right context, which is as an infrastructure solution, are more likely to assign the necessary human resources to have a successful implementation. We can help by educating customers through our Knowledge Architecture Audit and by providing them some of the expert human resources they will need for success.

Customers that view the software in the right context are also more likely to be willing to spend the right amount to get a solution that works. These customers will understand that the choice is:

• Buying a cheap search engine or content management or categorization software and slapping it on top of a mass of unstructured information and sitting back an listening to their users complain.
  
  
• Or purchasing the software that with the right intellectual infrastructure and human effort, will produce satisfied users and executive sponsors and will yield a higher return on investment despite a higher initial cost

Specific Services:

There are a number of ways that we can work with a partner.

A knowledge architecture audit can be part of a pre-sales engagement and/or part of a pilot project to help the customer understand what they need for success with your software.

We can also function as professional services partners during a pilot project and during the actual implementation. We would work with customers to develop taxonomies, metadata, controlled vocabularies etc. and help design the information architecture or navigation into their information, help them understand their user communities and their specific information behaviors, and how integrate their publishing procedures with the knowledge organization activities. Below is a partial list of how we might work with vendors in different areas: