Knowledge Management (KM)

As mentioned in the previous post, we are now looking into setting up a whole new knowledge management strategy for our office.

Currently this is dealt with per team. We have approx 250 people working in 15 account teams, giving IT support. Each of these accounts have their knowledge base and their knowledge management processes (if any). As you understand this is not an ideal situation. It is impossible to benefit from each others’ information, and there are a lot, really a lot of double, even triplicate documents. (after all most of us troubleshoot a printer in a similar way).

For a company that is trying to standardise all over the place, this is one of our worst areas.

According to many KM specialists, the first step in this whole plan should be to make sure we have senior management support. This to be honest is more difficult as it seemed. I was convinced that knowing the above, and actively trying to standardise, they would listen to a plan like this, but soon found out the “the idea is good, but it will be too expensive, or take you too long”. Yes, there will be a cost, and a considerable effort, but the return will be a very valuable asset; Knowledge! The work we do at service desks is for a huge part based on the knowledge we have at hand. An analyst can be great in troubleshooting and phone skills, but without documentation…. After all, none of us knows everything.

We are now at the stage that the senior management team is interested in our plans, but we are still not getting a clear go-ahead. This causes us to have to work on the plan outside office hours…

We already have the main outline of the plan. We have the platform (wss) and bit by bit we start to get support. I’m sure that one of these day’s well get the “official” project request. Then we can start gathering people to set up a small project team, and present our plans to the different teams, to get their feedback.

Also, we made a SWOT analysis of the current tools we use, which will help a lot identifying the requirements once we reach the lower level of our plan, which is how the database design would look.

At the moment we are putting everything we’ve got in a high level project plan. Mainly to keep ourselves on track and focused on the parts that are important at the moment and not get in to too much detail (which is a common mistake techies make!). As soon as we have it ready, Ill post an update!

The Sharepoint Adventure – Part III

A while ago, I wrote about the plans we had in my office for the move from Lotus Domino to MS Share point as a database driven application platform.

This was quite a while back, but it looks like we will get some kind of approval soon.

This is great, especially after it took me about a year to have senior management listen to me. Up until now, that has been my greatest headache. Mainly because I believe that applications we build here are a vital part of the organisation. If you can have them developed in-house,  you save a lot of money and you are sure they are fit for pourpose!

Management, however could not see through the first layer, and somehow wanted applications to “just be there”. When I learnt how they thought about this, it was a lot easier to convince them. I spent the last months walking around, trying to sell applications that did not exist yet. Finally they saw want I meant.

I can see now that there is a huge gap to bridge, because all this time I have been running around selling my big plans… I did not have a lot of time to continue training myself in this platform.

o-oh!

My manager, who lately is finding out what I’m busy with, signed me up with the company training system to start the MS course Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS): .NET Framework 2.0 Web Application. This, as it looks from the Lesson 1 viewpoint, will take me quite some time.

To give some more details on the environment we will be working with, here it is. Be aware, this is not the company’s main Share point server landscape, nor it is part of it. This is purely for our 300 person office.

We decided to go virtual, as the demands on the system where pretty low and the cost was a lot lower since we only pay for the licenses and had no hardware cost.

Finally well go for one Virtual 2003 Server, running IIS, ASP.Net and WSS (I did try to get the full MOSS, but the licence cost was a bit too high ) and a virtual SQL server.

To be honest I believe that this is fit for purpose, as the amount of usage (users / contents) will not be too high and if we exceed expectations the virtual servers can be upgraded quite easily.

The next step will be planning the contents. I already presented some in the plans I’ve put forward, but these now need to be worked on. A lot!

The most important plan is to re-design the Knowledge-management strategy within our office, and possibly within the whole company.  As I am also lecturing Knowledge Management internally, I really feel like being involved in this. I have been building the different knowledge bases we are using here, but this is a chance to setup the complete shop!

We already had a couple of meetings to look at how we are going to approach this. Still pretty high-level, as this is something we will  have to convince management…. Again! However, in the IT Support business, I believe the case is quickly made. Especially looking at our current KM organisation, in which every account team runs its own K Base and the teams do not comunicate with each other. I think this is where WSS can make the biggest difference!

Probably in one of my next posts, Ill explain a bit more about that!

Finishing Template

Finally it looks like a Domino database template I’ve been working on for the past month is coming through the pilot phase.

!!Yuhiiiiiiii!!

The template will be used to set up Knowledgebases for several different projects here in our office. Some elements are confidentially shared with end-markets/customers, and some between projects etc. This, for me, was one of the most complete projects Ive worked on, and contains about all my knowledge on domino application design.

To sum it up a bit, it contains things like a Document Change Control with approval cycle, expiry dates and warning emails on expiration etc. For this project, which started as a simple Notes Document library, I have been applying techniques like Javascript, and a lot of HTML and CSS to make it the mature kick-ass web-based-app it is now.

Want to have a look? Here is a small PPS:

Computacenter Knowledgebase V2 presentation