- Posted by Prashant on March 30, 2009
One of my sharepoint fellows on the Sharepoint user group at Linkedin asked the following question:
SharePoint for Knowledge Management?
I am looking to leverage SharePoint as a knowledge management system (KMS) at my organization. Has anyone done this sort of project before? What are some of the approaches and ideas that worked for you (and those that didn't)?
Thank you in advance for sharing your thoughts.
I thought this answer is relevant to a lot of other people who experience the same challenges on a daily basis. My answer to his question is as following:
Hi <NAME>,
We are currently executing an ECM project at a leading energy reseller in GTA. KM is a key component of this project. We have executed several projects as such.
The key challenge of KM is not just technology but promote adoption of tools and technology to facilitate easy capture and reuse of corporate knowledge base that comprises of content, processes, line of business applications amongst other things.
Non-technical aspects of your project that will directly impact your KM initiative are:
· Stakeholder participation right from the beginning of the project
· Analysis of your organizational content, processes, applications and etc. Understanding of content entities and the life cycle of each is very imperative.
· Analysis of the stakeholders habits, needs and their preferences
· Establishing training schedule all along the project (at various levels)
· Phasing the project out; rather than one big bang approach. Ease your stakeholder slowly into improved way of doing things.
· Migrating existing content and knowledge bases to the new KM platform.
· Others we can discuss…
Technical aspects of a SharePoint (or as a matter of fact in most KM projects) implementation that you will need to get right from the start while working on a KM project are:
· Integration of back office tools (i.e. Microsoft office) with your centralized KM platform. SharePoint can be a key component of that platform; but not the only thing you will need towards a true KM solution.
· Focusing on simple and easy to use. End User experience for content consumers and content managers and publishers has to be very easy and cannot be very different from what they are already used to.
· Search, Taxonomy, Meta-Data, Site Structure, Privacy & Security, Governance, Provisioning, Archiving, Operational issues and etc will be the multifaceted challenge that will force your architect to make the right choices that are correct for your organization.
· Understanding the limitations that MOSS platform brings and how to work around those. Couple of examples would be
o Scalability (scaling out) is limited at site collection level. In large implementations this has to be kept in mind.
o Taxonomy and security features are not tightly integrated with each other.
· Separating content storage model from logical access models.
· Others we can discuss….
Your challenges will come from setting the right habits for your stakeholders by standardizing processes with easy to use tools (that they use on a daily basis) without scaring them away. These will lead to right mechanisms in place to capture the knowledge. Retrieving the knowledge based on different organizational and searching models is another aspect you will have to keep in mind.
Please feel free to reach me at Prashant@tblocks.com if you need more advice. You can also visit our company web site at http://www.tblocks.com