Information sharing & Knowledge Management

Information Management is the core aspect of any business worth its salt. Organizations invest heavily in research and employ a myriad of other activities that lead to creation and accumulation of data. Recent emergence and proliferation of technologies that handle data has left many organizations with one of the greatest challenges of management in the 21st Century- Management of Information held within the organization. Today, more than ever before, organizations are battling with duplication of data, duplication of efforts as data is held in discrete silos within the organization, etc. Without an effective tool that an organization can use to organize and control who creates this data, its storage, usage, maintenance, disposal etc, information management can get nightmarish too. 

The above state of affairs calls for overall implementation of Enterprise Content Management to ensure that all the information bits held within the organization's many pockets is brought within the reach and control of the information managers, and that future information creation, use, storage and maintenance as well as archiving and disposal are streamlined to avoid the past mistakes.

Here comes the Government Regulations

Today, a number of countries have come up with legislations to govern all forms of information creation, usage and even disposal. This includes electronically held information.Of particular interest in this case is Kenya Communications Act (1998) which was amended in 2007 and passed to law in January, 2009. Most of the additional items have more to do with electronic information. In the pipeline is the Freedom of Information Bill which once passed to law will also see the widening of the expectations organization and individuals as far as information and data handling is concerned. Given that most of the information created today is electronic (born digital), there is more need than ever before to have a systematic handling of this information. failure to adhere to laid down legal requirements are likely to cost the organizations a lot in terms of loss of business and legal fines, not to mention possibilities of imprisonment.  

Which way for corporates?

Corporates on their part are also realizing the need for information management.If you are a corporate entity, you certainly do realize the need for the right and timely information. You also realize the need for proper management of information so that it is only the right persons who get the information that is needed for production and business continuity. Thirdly, you also do realize the power of sharing this information for maximum impact.

Information Sharing

It is human nature to share

Knowledge Management

Consider the following typical scenario:

Large organizations hold information about a lot of things, but they don’t always know what they hold. Consider this scenario: You’re a specialist in heart surgery, and you work in a field office of the Ministry of Health. A Community Health Officer based at the Headquarters calls you, requesting information about a design on remodeling of  disordered arteries. You know the Ministry has plenty of information about Disordered Artery management. But where is it? How do you find it? Whom do you call?

To complicate the situation  there are myriad cases of disordered arteries and their causes are pertinent in the treatment of such conditions. Some Heart surgeons at the Ministry have been following artery conditions ever since the heart surgery technology was introduced. A good-practices paper was written to document experience of one typical operation . Several university researchers have written journal articles about the effects of disordered arteries . How can you be sure, even if you identify one or two sources of expertise, that you’ve done more than scratch the surface of the available information?

That’s the kind of problem faced by thousands of organizations — thousands of times a day — and it’s the reason for the development of a concept known as knowledge management.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and Enterprise Search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information sharing across boundaries for better business insight. Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports all intranet, extranet, and Web applications across an enterprise within one integrated platform, instead of relying on separate fragmented systems.

The feature areas of MOSS 2007 are as follows:

• Collaboration. SharePoint allows teams to work together effectively, providing intuitive, flexible, and secure mechanisms for sharing information through the use of wikis and blogs, collaborating on and publishing documents, maintaining task lists, conducting surveys, developing and maintaining site templates customized for specific business uses, and implementing workflows.

• Portal. The SharePoint platform provides the capabilities to personalize the user experience of an enterprise Web site, to target content to various audiences based on sets of rules, to automatically facilitate intuitive navigation through the Web site while tailoring the navigation to the individual rights of the user, to deliver comprehensive site content management and structural facilities, and more.

• Enterprise Search. MOSS has the ability to quickly and easily locate relevant content distributed across a wide range of sites, document libraries, business application data repositories, and other sources, including files shares, various Web sites, Microsoft Exchange public folders, and other external databases — and to find the appropriate people who can help answer questions or be involved in projects.

• Content Management. SharePoint's content management features facilities for the creation, publication, and management of content, regardless of whether that content exists in discrete documents or is published as Web pages. Also featured are content management scenarios including document management, records management, and Web content management.

• Business Forms and Integration. SharePoint features the ability to rapidly and effectively implement forms-based business processes, from design to publication to user access, by using standard Web browsers or a rich client application such as Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007. Also included is the ability to connect with structured systems such as databases and line-of-business applications, and the ability to access that information in a number of ways.

• Business Intelligence: SharePoint can deliver information critical to business objectives through a wide range of mechanisms, from server-based spreadsheets accessing business data in real time and performing sophisticated analysesto the presenatation of key performance indicators (KPI's)through enterprise Web sites.