IT Factory to Buy Knowledge Management Firm

As reported by John S. McCright, eWEEK, business applications developer IT Factory Inc is adding knowledge management capabilities to its software through the acquisition of Synergistics Inc. But IT Factory CEO Lars Johansen doesn't want you to call his company a knowledge management vendor.

"Knowledge management holds great promise for any enterprise looking for a greater return on their investment in human and intellectual capital," said Johansen, who gave an address entitled "Let's not call it KM anymore" at the Basex Group Knowledge Management 2001 conference in New York. "But rather than think of knowledge management as an application in its own right, we're going to bundle KM functionality into line-of-business applications that employees use on a daily basis."

The acquisition of Cincinnati-based Synergistics brings two KM platforms -- Prevail and Authoriti -- to IT Factory. IT Factory, of Cambridge, Mass., plans to integrate functionality from those platforms into the business applications it develops, including applications for sales force automation, help desk, customer service, e-commerce and project management, among others.

IT Factory also sells software development tools for creating collaboration applications that run on Lotus Development Corp's Domino and Microsoft Corp's Exchange groupware platforms.

Lotus and Microsoft are important partners for IT Factory, and both have recently launched KM offerings of their own. But Johansen said the Synergistics KM capabilities that IT Factory is adding to its applications are complementary to those of Lotus and Microsoft, not competitive.

IT Factory will gain about 60 employees with the Synergistics deal, the terms of which have not been revealed. The company plans to move most of its application development work to Cincinnati, where it will be overseen by Lewie Miller, president of Synergistics.

Dana Gardner, an analyst with AMR Research in Boston, agrees that KM as a standalone application is something of an outdated concept.

"Knowledge management is a feature and a function that has horizontal applications rather than an application itself," Gardner said. "KM is often defined too broadly. Creating a horizontal approach to KM and bringing it into specific application solutions is a good direction to go in. You need to get it into the ecology of these solutions."