Knowledge Management Platform

• T H E K N O W L E D G E D I R E C T O R Y Finding “who knows what” in an organization has always been a time-intensive process. A knowledge management system allows users to quickly access peoples’ skills and areas of expertise through an integrated knowledge directory. The knowledge directory should allow queries by taxonomy area (for example, who are the experts on marketing?) and return a list of experts ranked by experience. In addition, a knowledge directory should be able to be queried directly or accessed from a document view or result list. A key aspect of the knowledge directory is the ability to include administrator-defined rules (for example, “always make Bob Smith the top expert in network management”). This ensures that particular experts can always be identified (or hidden).
• K N O W L E D G E C A T E G O R I Z A T I O N Many techniques exist for categorizing knowledge, ranging from manual, human-centric approaches to completely automated processes based on artificial intelligence methods. While fully manual processes are time and labor intensive, fully automated approaches do not yield accurate enough results. However, a categorization server that automates a first-level classification of knowledge assets by using knowledge map categories saves a good portion of the labor required to fully classify information. The organization can then incorporate the final classification as part of an editorial or content management process. 
• K N O W L E D G E A G E N T S After finding a collection of relevant knowledge assets, users need to know when similar assets appear, regardless of the individual knowledge silo in which they reside. Users should be able to set up agents for monitoring the knowledge warehouse based on full text searches, knowledge map categories, author names and other metadata fields. They should be able to set up profiles for filtering news feeds and other dynamic sources. Notification frequency (by time and/or quantity) and method (by e-mail or personal web page) are important parameters that should be selectable by the end user. Administrators and content editors need to be able to direct specific information to a defined group of users through push mechanisms such as Netscape Netcaster, Microsoft’s Channel Definition Format and others. 
• D I S T R I B U T E D S Y S T E M S Bandwidth limitations and other concerns will move large organizations to install more than one knowledge warehouse across the enterprise. To keep an integrated approach to finding knowledge, organizations require a query broker that distributes searches across one or more knowledge warehouse and then returns an integrated set of results. Knowledge assets are not merely contained within the knowledge warehouse or within the corporation itself, but also exist on the Internet. A query broker should also provide integrated searching of other repositories, including popular Internet search services. 
• C O N T E N T M A N A G E M E N T A knowledge management system that leaves content management up to end users quickly succumbs to “information pollution.” Successful knowledge management implementations appoint knowledge managers or content editors whose job is to evangelize knowledge management processes and to validate and edit content in their area of expertise. Without a content manager to ensure that information is categorized appropriately and that the content is useful and understandable, users quickly begin to have difficulty finding what they are looking for. The system soon overflows with knowledge assets of questionable value. A knowledge warehouse should be flexible enough to meet the organization’s content policies and to operate either with or without editorial approval, or with a combination of end user and content manager supervision. In addition, the administrator should be able to tie the editorial process to particular areas of the taxonomy or particular types of documents. 1

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Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management is the collection of processes that govern the creation, dissemination, and utilization of knowledge. In one form or another, knowledge management has been around for a very long time. Practitioners have included philosophers, priests, teachers, politicians, scribes, Liberians, etc.

So if Knowledge Management is such an ageless and broad topic what role does it serve in today's Information Age? These processes exist whether we acknowledge them or not and they have a profound effect on the decisions we make and the actions we take, both of which are enabled by knowledge of some type. If this is the case, and we agree that many of our decisions and actions have profound and long lasting effects, it makes sense to recognize and understand the processes that effect or actions and decision and, where possible, take steps to improve the quality these processes and in turn improve the quality of those actions and decisions for which we are responsible?

 Knowledge management is not a, "a technology thing" or a, "computer thing" If we accept the premise that knowledge management is concerned with the entire process of discovery and creation of knowledge, dissemination of knowledge , and the utilization of knowledge then we are strongly driven to accept that knowledge management is much more than a "technology thing" and that elements of it exist in each of our jobs.       Readmore...