Foreword

Successful business leaders have always known that their accomplishments depend on managing the knowledge of their 'circle of innovation'. Their circle is their organization; no matter if they are referring to their staff, their division or their extended enterprise, the same basic principles apply. Promoting innovation through collaboration, assuring that information is easily attainable. Finding the right person at the right time is paramount to providing the decisive synergy to get the task accomplished effectively and efficiently. The successful business leader understands not only the metrics of the general ledger, but also the metrics of business intelligence. The successful business leader knows how to effectively measure and evaluate his or her organization's intelligence, and constantly takes the right steps to 'make things happen.'

How intelligent is your organization? Do you consider your organization a circle of innovation? What are the right steps? Up until now, leaders have had to rely on their instincts alone in making this evaluation. If you are reading this book, chances are you too are such a leader-always attempting to harness and align the factors for success. Leveraging your experiences, you attempt to fit past scenarios to today's information-intensive environment to create analogies to better understand one aspect or another, and thus, how best to exploit your organization's position for the future. You are always attempting to find the right tools to make better intelligence decisions. However, you have found that the past does not always fit as nicely as we would like into present requirements. Knowledge management, though closely related to prior sciences, has become a science in its own right. The Knowledge Tornado: Bridging the Corporate Knowledge Gap treats the subject as a science, and provides ample subject matter in a straightforward style, building a broad base of common sense - in short, this book is a great tool of reference.

Never has there been a better time for putting into place knowledge management principles in your organization. The time is now, the technology is maturing, the economic climate is ripe, and recently customers are demanding it. Based purely on finances, corporate drivers are both internal as well as external. Internally as organizations seek to be more agile, and externally as organizations seek to be more responsive to their customers' needs. Because of these prime drivers, knowledge management plays a prominent role in our new global economy, where collaboration is not an afterthought in our ebusiness implementations but instead is architected to be one of the critical foundational components. Marcus Goncalves' creative approach connects ebusiness, KM, and collaboration together to meet the organization's strategic requirements and create the winning mindset to making your organization world-class.

The Knowledge Tornado: Bridging the Corporate Knowledge Gap provides us with a roadmap detailing the best routes to take on our journey, providing us with a wealth of information on what it takes to be a successful Chief Knowledge Officer. How rare it is to find a book that informs us on the "How-to" and at the same time identifies in a thorough manner the potential roadblocks to success. Marcus Goncalves is unique in that not only does he identify critical obstacles but also takes it up a notch and provides tried-and-true solutions to overcoming the barriers that have plagued previous initiatives. Perhaps you have learned these lessons the hard way, and wished you had the chance to read this book. No matter if you are just beginning your journey or if you are an experienced knowledge manager, there is much valuable information here for you. The insights that Marcus Goncalves advances in this book are a necessary read for everyone - organizations must build on this model to be successful in today's volatile marketspace.

Bruce T. Peat
President of eProcess Solutions
Cofounder XML/EDI Group
Coauthor of "Professional ebXML Foundations"
and "Professional XML"