Knowledge Management: Frequently Asked Questions

• Is Knowledge Management Expensive?
• How do I start?
• Are Knowledge Management Projects BIG?
• What are the core components of a Knowledge Management Project?

Is Knowledge Management Expensive?

Knowledge Management is like any other IT project - give the users what they actually want and make it work.

The premier Knowledge Management products are packed with features (such as taxonomy editors, automatic categorisation engines etc) and usually require their own servers to run effectively. They are priced accordingly.

At the other end of the scale, it is perfectly possible to enable Index Services on your existing NT File Servers to give your users a basic search facility across all of the documents in your organisation. Importantly the appropriate security permissions must be arranged on the file server, otherwise your users might be reading something they shouldn't!

How do I Start?

You may find you've started already. If your organisation has an Intranet then you've taken the first steps into Knowledge Management. The trick is to extend it and allow everybody to contribute content to it.

This probably requires a Content Management system (or set of procedures) to be put in place so that people can change their own documents without changing the corporate style.

Add a search facility (if it's not their already).

Alert people to things that are new - this can either be delivered via Digital Dashboard technology directly into their Outlook Mail Client or alternatively you might develop some Intranet applications such as 'Bulletin Boards'.

If you want to take the applications side even further, consider delivering workflow applications via a browser on the Intranet. Examples of such applications would include: telephone directories, bulletin boards, issue managers, status boards, timesheet entries, and human resources workflow applications e.g. holiday approval, overtime approval, sickness notification etc.

You might decide that the final step is to allow people to read the Intranet offline (such as on their laptops) or, for the more adventurous, to have the headlines accessible via a WAP phone.

Are Knowledge Management Projects BIG?

If you're going to do the whole organisation at once then they're massive undertakings and necessitate a 'tweak' to the underlying culture of the organisation. This approach is high risk and can be disruptive in the short term.

That's why we suggest starting with smaller chunks - some of which might not seem like 'real' Knowledge Management projects at all.

One of our most successful 'projects' was a relatively simple piece of code that delivered headlines from 35 different news feeds via a protocol called RSS directly to a folder within a user's Outlook mail client. The user could see which stories had changed, scan the synopses quickly and obtain the full story if required.

What are the core components of a Knowledge Management Project?

The basic components behind a Knowledge Management system are:

Presentation The interface to the system for the user must be intuitive to use and simple. Our policy is that where possible, the introduction of the new system should not change a user's existing working practices i.e. if they like storing documents on their home disk drive on a server then don't force them to store it elsewhere - write a migration script that transfers the documents automatically. Data Warehouse Everybody thinks of a data warehouse as a giant, all encompassing database. We just think it's where the data lies. It might be in an Excel file on your laptop, a Powerpoint presentation on your server or client relationship information in your corporate database. Data is everywhere - you just need to get your hands on it when you want. Search and Retrieval The 'old' keyword search engines have now been superceded by those that use categories and meta-data to deliver the information that you want. The new search engines are intelligent and can even start taking 'hints' from your own search patterns - homing in on those information sources that you prefer. Categorisation / Taxonomy The quality of your search results is enhanced if you can organise the raw data once you've got it. This is what categorisation is all about. A Taxonomy can be loosely thought of as a collection of categories that is applied to your data because different people might view the same data in different ways e.g. an equities research assistant will organise their data differently to a fixed income research assistant but the underlying data is the same. Data Mining Data mining extends the search and retrieval concept to look for trends or correlations in the data that you might not realise were there. The tools used in data mining may include artificial intelligence / neural networks and often have a sophisticated visualisation display to represent your data graphically. Collaboration / Workflow Knowledge Management is about sharing information - so it's not surprising that sharing applications comes high on our list too. Our experience is that a simple NetMeeting session where the same spreadsheet can be viewed and manipulated by two people in different offices supplemented by a speaker-phone is a superior collaboration tool than video-conferencing (and cheaper too!) eLearning Our final category is learning information. This might be as simple as company procedures manuals being on line, coding standards or legal documentation. It might include an entire interactive Computer Based Training (CBT) suite.