What is a Knowledge Management System and Why Would I Need One?

What is a Knowledge Management System and Why Would I Need One? Over the past month, we have visited with several firms that are considering implementing a knowledge management system. We have listened to their requirements and have shown them Microsoft抯 new knowledge management products, Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server 2.0.   Our first step in working with these organizations is to classify their knowledge management needs and to then determine what, if any, knowledge management systems might help them. In this article, we will describe three knowledge management capabilities that are commonly asked for by our clients and we will discuss how Microsoft抯 new knowledge management products can help organizations meet these needs. Information Retrieval Many knowledge workers need information created by others at their organization to help them with their current work. One key requirement of a knowledge management system is the ability to help workers find experts who can assist them with a problem and help them find documents that are relevant to that problem. Consultants, for example, often refer to prior proposals or prior presentations when working with current clients. To access these documents, they often have to first identify previous relevant projects, contact someone who worked on the project, to locate one or more key documents, and then find the document on a file share or ask the manager to send it to them as an e-mail attachment. This process is often both time-consuming and error prone. Knowledge management systems provide access to client and project information background information, to key project documents, and to information on an individual抯 expertise. These systems can be people-centric, client-centric, project-centric, and/or document-centric. The most powerful and complex system provides easy navigation among clients, projects, documents and people. For example, you could start with a client, find key information on all the projects worked on with that client (e.g., start and end-dates, key deliverables), find all the people who worked on the projects, and all the documents produced by the client team. SharePoint Portal Server 2.0 has these features as well as tight integration with Microsoft Office. This allows managers to categorize documents when they submit them (check them in) to SharePoint. They can also search for documents in SharePoint from within Office applications as well as from within SharePoint抯 web-based portal. In addition, managers can post their expertise on personal portal pages. This allows others within the organization to easily find experts. The key problem with information retrieval, however, is not technical; it is organizational. Companies must invest in the people and processes to insure that project documents are submitted in a timely manner and that individual expertise pages are updated. All this information must be made easily accessible through search. In addition, the organization抯 taxonomy must be developed and maintained. This taxonomy is the categorization scheme for the documents. New categories must be added as business needs change. A thesaurus must also be developed and maintained. Searchers should be able to search for 憆e-engineering? 慴usiness process redesign? or 態PR?and obtain the same results. Collaboration Many knowledge workers need information created by others at their organization to help them with their current work. One key requirement of a knowledge management system is the ability to help workers find experts who can assist them with a problem and help them find documents that are relevant to that problem. Organizations employ teams to work on projects. These teams share information and collaborate to produce work product. This work product is typically a collection of Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations. Knowledge management systems can play a key role in facilitating collaboration by managing these work-in-process documents. The team needs a virtual project room, where all the latest documents are stored and where team members (and only team members) can check out documents, edit them and check them back in. Team members can also subscribe to documents, receiving e-mail notification when the document has been checked in or out. This eliminates the problem of team members working on different versions of the document inadvertently, in which case one team member抯 changes could be easily over-written and lost. Microsoft抯 Windows SharePoint Services, an add-on to the new Windows 2003 Server, addresses this collaboration problem. Each project team can have its own project room (called a team portal). All team documents can be accessed through the portal. Document status can be checked, documents can be checked out and checked back in, and a revision history of the document can be viewed. As with the SharePoint Portal Server, Windows SharePoint Services are tightly integrated with Microsoft Office. Documents can be checked in and checked out from within Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Portals Portals are not necessarily part of a knowledge management system. However, many knowledge management systems, including Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server have a portal capability. Portals compliment knowledge management. Knowledge management collaboration solutions use a team portal as the repository for storing team documents. Knowledge management document management solutions often embed their search capability in a portal. Individual web pages are often integrated with a 揚eople Finder?capability in the portal. Using Windows SharePoint Services, companies can build team portals, providing the virtual project room described above. SharePoint Portal Server allows a company to build a corporate portal on top of the team portals. The corporate portal provides access to information retrieval, document subscription, and access to individual web pages. The portal can be extended to transform it into a corporate intranet, by adding other web parts (customizable portal building blocks). These web parts can provide corporate performance measurement information (e.g., a scorecard), access to frequently used information and documents (e.g., directions to corporate offices or HR policy documents), and access to external data through a gallery of third party web parts. Finally, access to different parts of the portal can be restricted using Microsoft抯 Active Directory Groups. Summary While knowledge management systems have historically meant different things to different people, there is a growing convergence of opinion as to what constitutes a knowledge management system. With the introduction of the latest version of SharePoint, Microsoft is helping to point users in the direction of knowledge management systems that incorporate collaboration, information retrieval and portals to provide a company抯 stakeholders (employees, customers, and suppliers) with easy access to the information they need.