Carolina M. Reid

Electronic health records are not new. The concept has been around since the first PC hit the stores. Yet despite the much improved systems and greater reasons to use them, fewer than 20% of physicians' practices use electronic medical records.

At one time, knowledge management (KM) purely encompassed the library-style research-and-documentation endeavor required to organize knowledge-primarily for companies that trade in knowledge, such as law firms and consultancies. Early in its life, KM was defined by Thomas A. Stewart in a Fortune magazine article entitled "Mapping Corporate Brainpower," as "Efforts to transmute the accumulated knowledge of individual employees into a corporate asset." Today, KM has grown well beyond these original boundaries, and its tenets are leveraged by organizations of all kinds to manage information and intellectual assets.

Social networking for the enterprise is booming. The sector is unquestionably adding revenues for new providers, adding jobs at old companies, and adding profits throughout the industry. In a wave that seemed to begin in earnest just 18 months ago, enterprises now embrace these tools to achieve better (and less expensive) results across most major business functions despite fears over losing control of company secrets.

Has the enterprise portal been helped by or swept into oblivion by the successive waves of progress of Web 2.0 and the already-much-ballyhooed Web 3.0? Despite the phenomenal growth of collaborative web culture, the notion of a centrally managed, single point of entry to reach company applications and content persists in companies across the globe. Yet the opinions of experts in the field differ greatly on what the priorities should be today.

Green IT is all around. These days, anyone so inclined could fill his or her days signing up for green IT initiatives. Now, companies in the software-as-a-service sector are leading a charge to show how SaaS is the ultimate secret weapon for reducing any client company's carbon footprint.

Take a closer look at SORCE, Ltd., one of the 12 companies that inspired the most banter among the EContent 100 judges during the voting process.