Corporate Amnesia? Evernote for iPhone May Have the Cure

by Bill French on 08/05/09 at 6:53 pm

Bill French is an information architect specializing in Internet applications. He is also the co-founder of MyST Technology Partners and Senior Editor for iPhoneCTO.

Corporations are forgetful – they tend to drop the ball more often because, unlike people, they lack contiguous memory. To be effective, a successful knowledge management (KM) initiative starts with an undeniable requirement – capturing and finding information must be as frictionless as possible. The more fluid the process, the more likely it will be utilized.

image1 thumb Corporate Amnesia? Evernote for iPhone May Have the Cure

Imagine you’re sitting in a conference room helping your marketing team work through the process of redefining a portion of your web site. The team agrees on a particular diagram that was painstakingly crafted on a whiteboard during a three hour brainstorming session. It’s now time to implement the strategy. You need to transpose the information on the whiteboard and put it some place where it can be found, reviewed, and shared.

You quickly raise your iPhone, snap a picture of the drawing, and submit it (along with some keywords and description) to “the cloud”. The image is synchronized to your Dell PC, and your Macbook Pro. Furthermore, you can search for this whiteboard image, but not just by the tags and description you added when capturing the image; you can search for words in the image – literally, the words written on the whiteboard are as findable as the words attached to the image artifact.

Evernote makes this scenario a reality.

image thumb2 Corporate Amnesia? Evernote for iPhone May Have the Cure

Searching for words and phrases within images changes the KM game – it transforms the nature of knowledge capture. Artifacts that were previously ruled out as possible sources of knowledge resources, can now be embraced. Snapshots of hand-written notes, pictures with embedded captions, advertisements from a magazine, charts, diagrams, mind-maps – pretty much anything you can observe – they can now be ruled in as core KM resources.

While Evernote provides some game-changing technology for a bottom-up KM approach, the business requirements and methodologies for effective deployment in widespread corporate environments are not entirely obvious. But there are some simple approaches that can be used to leverage Evernote for enterprise use. The key objective is to create sustainable benefits that lead to a reduction in corporate forgetfulness. This can be achieved today because at its core, Evernote enhances productivity for individuals that must capture and annotate their observations for the benefit of other enterprise workers. The last mile of KM is the distribution of captured knowledge in a manner that it can be found (or automatically finds employees) at the moment they need it.

It’s possible to chip away at these requirements with a variety of web services that provide collaborative sharing and relatively useful security models. Encouraging employees to blog inward goes a long way towards leveraging iPhone plus Evernote as a KM tool. Evernote also supports item import and export so its possible to set up a sharing system with other iPhone-enabled application services products such as Box.net, an enterprise-grade document sharing and collaboration service.

It’s important to embrace Evernote for what it does best – collecting, persisting, synchronizing, and organizing artifacts that can serve as the foundation for building more discrete knowledge resources in the enterprise. Evernote does this so well that iPhone users will want to use it to create a tipping point – more remembering events and fewer forgetting events. Be sure to read this recent iPhoneCTO article about Evernote.