The KM Technology Infrastructure.

• Author: DUFFY, JAN

Knowledge Management (KM) is a business process and a professional discipline. KM describes a set of business practices and technologies used to assist an organization to obtain maximum advantage from one of its most important assets -- knowledge. Evaluating the technology needed to support this important business process requires a deep understanding of its broad applicability and the potential reach of its scope.

The KM process requires technology to support the capture and sharing of people's knowledge, promote collaboration, and provide unhindered access to an extensive range of information. Technology must support all activities involved in the knowledge life cycle (e.g., capture, organization, retrieval, distribution, and maintenance). To quote Michael Zack (1998), "The information technology infrastructure should provide a seamless pipeline for the flow of explicit knowledge through the five stages of the refining process to enable

* capturing knowledge

* defining, storing, categorizing, indexing, and linking digital objects corresponding to knowledge units

* searching for (pulling) and subscribing to (pushing) relevant content

* presenting content with sufficient flexibility to render it meaningful and applicable across multiple contexts of use.

KM Systems Architecture

There is no out-of-the-box KM solution. Because it is a synthesis of several disciplines and business practices, KM uses an assembly of technologies. The key to success is a well-designed architecture as the foundation.

In the context of information systems, an architecture identifies a system's components and describes how they interact. Developing the architecture establishes high-level understanding of how systems and subsystems interact. According to GartnerGroup (Austin, et al. 1999), there are three layers (or groupings) in the typical enterprise systems architecture model. They are the following:

* Data layer, a unifying abstraction across different types of data with potentially different storage mechanisms (e.g., relational databases, textual data, video, and audio)

* Process layer, which describes the logic that links data with the use people or systems make of it. In the first instance (people as users), presentation is via the user interface; in the second (systems as users), presentation is via program interfaces used to support application integration.

* User interface (UI) layer, which provides access for people to the information assets of the enterprise via logic incorporated in the process layer

It is easier, however, to consider the KM architecture in five layers:

1) user interface

2) knowledge metamodel

3) knowledge repository (or source repositories)

4) knowledge access tools

5) knowledge management enablers

Figure 1 describes the knowledge architecture and shows how the layers are arranged and how they relate to each other (Duffy 1999).

[Figure 1 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The KM systems architecture does not exist in isolation. The technology needed to support KM may already be incorporated into the overall enterprise technology architecture. It is important to understand how technology unique to KM will relate to and integrate with other technologies and to determine what impact, if any, KM will have on the existing architecture. Using the Gartner three-layer description as a guide, the KM architecture layers are integrated as shown in Table 1.

Table 1 - INTEGRATION OF ENTERPRISE AND KM SYSTEMS ARCHITECTURES

Enterprise Systems Architecture KM Systems Architecture User Interface User Interface Data Layer Knowledge Metamodel and Knowledge Map Knowledge Repository/Repositories Knowledge Access Tools Process Layer Knowledge Management Enablers User Interface

The user interface (UI) protects the user from technology complexities. It represents the workspace in which the user lives on a day-to-day basis and provides a consistent window into the applications and data used regularly. In many instances, portals similar to those used to access the Internet (e.g., Yahoo!, Lycos, Excite, or Plumtree) represent the user interface layer.

A well-designed UI must be intuitive, responsive, and valuable to the user. Ease of use is critical; without it, the entire KM system's success is threatened. In today's fast-paced business world, there is little time for extensive training (the only way to overcome technical inadequacies) or for reading manuals. If any system intended for day-today use requires more than one hour of the user's time to absorb basic features and become productive, it is probably too...