Knowledge Management is front and center in the eyes of corporate leaders: according to Forbes, leading executives at the Microsoft CEO Summit a few weeks back were singing the praises of KM as a key component of their client-centric strategies. The value of content increasingly centers around transactions, and businesses are learning to align their resources around everything that can help them to foster current relationships that lead to those transactions. Along with creating this immediate understanding of markets comes accountability, however: in the financial securities markets, the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) is requiring archiving of instant messaging communications for accountability purposes, in much the same way that audio tapes of "squawk box" conversations have been a part of the permanent record of securities trades. The NASD move is understandable, but somewhat redundant: institutions of all kinds, as they implement instant messaging as a central part of collaborative content systems, are learning that there is gold in these online exchanges that can be mined through text searching and analysis tools.