Remember the old days, say, fifteen years ago, before scanning technology came along, when cashiers checked you out by adding up your purchases manually?  Remember how there were always one or checkers who were faster than their co-workers and you always tried to get on their line so you could get out of the store quicker? 

A lot of this informal “artistocracy of the nimble” sort of thing still goes on in modern business offices–especially among knowledge workers.  There are always a handful of people who are more adept at finding and deploying information than most of their fellow cubicle dwellers.  Even with something as simple as Google, there are some people who are better at finding relevant information than others because they have developed special search habits and techniques. 

Think of how much more productive your organization would be if everyone worked at the same level of your star performers.  Imagine an industrial-strength enterprise app that is so simple to use that it requires no training or special knowledge to learn and so smart that it makes all users instantly more productive?  Imagine the knowledge office equivalent of the supermarket revolution that turned every checker into a whiz.

The European-based software firm System One has developed a brillant collaborative knowledge management tool that may be just that.  It makes finding, capturing and sharing information with co-workers as easy as dragging a can of soup across a bar code scanner.  System One searches both web and enterprise data–emails, documents, database records, web pages, RSS feeds and intranet files–as well as proprietary internal systems to which the particular user has access, such as  SAP or CRM applications. 

That search capability alone would make it valuable tool but what makes System One truly a killer app is its seamless integration of enterprise data and authoring with real-time analysis of what you write.  Let’s say you’re doing research about outsourcing.  You click to start a ”journal” page (just a blog entry for us Americans).  As you’re typing, System One finds (real-time) relevant links and displays them right below the box where you are working.  Throw in the word “India” and watch the search results immediately focus on outsourcing in India.  Add the word “China” and now the system looks internally and exernally for information about India and China. 

Basically, the software knows automatically what the smartest and fastest researchers know and that is how to build and narrow search queries to find the most relevant information quickly.  Once users have finished their research they save it in a kind of internal wiki (users don’t have to know it’s a wiki or even what a wiki is), grouped by Author, Location, Team or something else, and the next time someone is researching the same topic, the information will there to build on.

There is a five-minute screencast here.  Prepare to be amazed.