Industry analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe shared his thoughts on this topic in a recent KMWorld article.  For starters, Pelz-Sharpe summarizes the all-too-typical corporate information environment this way: “We have multiple disconnected silos of information, mountains of duplicate files, poor search functionality, and often little-to-no structure or governance applied to knowledge or information assets.”  Sadly, this is the case at most organizations when they first approach Northern Light to explore our enterprise knowledge management solution for market and competitive intelligence.  It is not uncommon for such organizations to have a glut of uncoordinated Microsoft SharePoint sites on their network – one pharmaceutical company that came to us had 50,000 SharePoint sites… and another 80,000 abandoned SharePoint sites! – which is a recipe for information chaos.