Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Is your enterprise getting smarter? Shouldn't it be? Mark Montgomery, founder and CEO of Kyield, argues that the semantic enterprise is emerging, motivated as much as anything by the recognition brought on by the financial crisis that our corporate institutions ain't as smart as we thought they were.

When the increasing load of data within organizations and their partner chains lacks embedded intelligence, and is neither interoperable nor interchangeable, it's easier to avoid accountability, assume credit improperly, and of course spend massive amounts of time searching for information, connections and expertise rather than delivering innovation for the organization.

Kyield is a holistic but modular and interoperable semantic system that aims at delivering a higher level of yield for the knowledge worker, and the enterprise he supports. It targets solving the issues of information overload and quality of work problems that foster intentional or accidental duplication and hamper innovation, embedding semantic intelligence into file types ranging from office documents to video presentations and embracing semantic standards for data transactions.

"The side effects of a holistic semantic system in the enterprise is that you get a whole bunch of other things," Montgomery says, from really great metrics thanks to having all this data you wouldn't have otherwise to more accurate probability forecasting to better red flagging.

The company has been working on Kyield for some time, including roots it has in its founder's previous efforts with knowledge systems like GWIN Pro. Late last month it announced the solution would be available for license to organizations as well as consultancies and integrators.

Montgomery notes that despite the claims by many solutions today to embrace universal standards for data transaction flow, plenty of issues remain to challenge interoperability, so this isn't an off-the-shelf solution. Even if enterprises themselves are adopting semantic web standards internally, there's no guarantee that the partners with whom they must share information have.

Untapped metadata

The essence of a semantic enterprise, he says, is the existence of embedded intelligence about people, projects, the organization, and so on within files. The impact of having that kind of metadata in a world of accelerating information flow can't be underestimated, Montgomery says.

"Literally there is no way to comprehend that we would have had the mortgage crisis if the incoming data had had the intelligence it needed," he says, noting that data about housing prices and earnings that showed the discrepancy between them was a matter of public record. While that data in its raw form could easily be ignored among the tumult of other information, it becomes harder to ignore when there's embedded intelligence surrounding it. "And if you know you can't escape it, you are more likely to act on it," he says.

Equally important is aligning the interest of the individual with the enterprise, and rewarding them for true performance. A holistic semantic system that ties files embedded with intelligence specifying and personally identifying an individual's work to human resources and compensation systems is one way to drive that alignment, he says. It's difficult for organizations to do this today, but he suspects it may be more critical that they get onboard with the meritocracy approach, because when the economy turns around, people who are feeling unappreciated may move to greener pastures.

"Until you have semantic data you can't do a good job of proving individual merit, especially in large organizations where there's a problem anyhow," he says. "Those who see managers taking credit for all their underlings' work -- those people are probably going to leave. That's an expensive problem in terms of innovation and quality of work. Oftentimes it's the beginning of the end of an organization."

Having intelligence on people and their work products also helps when it comes to trying to find experts in the organization and connecting them with those who need to leverage their expertise.

"We're certain to see much smarter organizations in the next few years," he predicts. "It will be a requirement to function and to be competitive."