When clients come to me for help in the challenging domain of Information & Knowledge Management, they have already begun to realize the importance of keeping informed of relevant and critical information as it is created and finding the right existing information quickly and easily. As the organizations grow and the information at their disposal skyrockets, discerning customers understand how dearly non-optimal management of information is costing them.
Effective management of archived knowledge and processes related to the dynamics of information exchange are essential keys in facilitating the sharing of information and harnessing the knowledge and experience of an organization’s workforce. There is often too much duplication of effort, failure to capitalize on existing competences, and lack of synchronization of changing information and dynamics of decision taking.
The challenges of sharing information and managing knowledge
Facilitating taking informed decisions
As an organization gets larger, it is often said that the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. Different directorates may need to make decisions and take actions related with their own domains of responsibility, but affecting the same subject or recipient. Without coordinated information exchange the recipient may end up receiving contradictory or incoherent instructions. There is often a need for coordinating activities between disparate parties in the organization, but there is no process in place to flag such dynamics in a timely manner so that the necessary information is exchanged before action is taken. Managing practical information exchange without flooding the involved parties with a deluge of information while ensuring that necessary mandatory processes are in place to ensure coordination where it is necessary is one of the existential challenges of information management.
Finding what you need to know
With the mounting deluge of data, finding what one needs is becoming increasingly frustrating. Data is often distributed in different repositories across organizations and servers, often based on different platforms and tools. Documents and data are based on scores of different formats, requiring different tools to open or view them. All told, the situation is more than often a chaotic nightmare for the user.
Understandably, organizations often wish to keep some of their legacy project, data and document management systems, but at the same time aim to increase their efficiency, and, if possible provide the user with a simple one-stop ‘access to everything’ interface. Our experts are quite familiar with this situation and we have found that by complementing and extending existing systems with the addition of some specific tools can be a good approach towards resolving these problems.
Very briefly, we have found that there are several critical areas that must be optimally and elegantly dealt with in order to facilitate sharing information and knowledge in an efficient and timely manner.
Our team of experts have reviewed a number of solutions and we have identified what we are certain are the appropriate solutions for a large organization, government agency or company. Instead of going into great detail here and providing detailed documents, we have found that potential interested parties are pleased to have an online remote demonstration of the capabilities of our solutions, thus avoiding time-consuming meetings, travel, and PowerPoint presentations, all of which take much time of all parties. We would therefore be pleased to arrange a remotely administered demo of these tools in a non-bureaucratic manner without any obligation.
Challenge I: DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT
Although some of our clients have already progressed to using document management systems to handle their numerous documents, alone, this is not sufficient to ensure that processes are followed in creation of the document, and that the right metadata are embedded. Moreover, we have found that ideally an optimal solution takes into account the processes and approval stages incorporating them into the creation and archiving of the document.
Such a system can be built up by combining industry-tandard tools of task management and workflow with a standard platform, such as SharePoint, adapted and customized to the individual needs and processes of the organization.
The approach is best illustrated with a case study whose goals, although specific, are not so different from many other typical situations.
A typical real world scenario
There are many solutions offered by many vendors; here we concentrate on a typical MS SharePoint-based situation. Although SharePoint comes with extensive document management, search, workflow, tasking and traceability functionalities, a full knowledge-management capable DMS solution requires customization and, often, 3rd-party extensions.
The core goals usually include:
- Provide flexible, but automated support to author, review, and approve documents
- Enhance user experience through visually-oriented features
- Ensure compliance with regulatory and policy requirements
Finding and seeing content in an efficient way makes it easier to act. Document management usually goes hand in hand with review and approval processes.
For the SharePoint world we have found that visualizing the results with clear document previews, both as thumbnails and for the full document, significantly enhances the user experience and efficiency. The extension of the functionality to search results adds to this again.
Extending the SharePoint search to increase the search effectiveness and refinability combined with functionality that links business processes to the search results helps to make search-driven solutions very effective.
Of course, what applies to SharePoint applies generally to all DMS, CMS systems, whether they are custom built for the organization or purchased from a well-known vendor.
Sometimes it is possible to leverage the strong points of one solution to enhance the effectiveness of a complete environment. Intranet search applications created on SharePoint with enhanced search and document preview capabilities can be used to index and search almost any data source.
Please select the tab Challenge II 
Challenge II: Information Management
Information management encompasses dynamic processing of information in such a manner that duplication of work will become less likely, and inconsistent decision taking e.g. by disparate units, will be prevented. Resolving such issues do not always require new tools or applications, but rather require effective implementation of existing tools.
A key example of where the Information Management and work processes management fails is the occurrence where two organizational units present completely contradictory outputs to the same recipient, based on the same input information. Both OUs process the input to their best ability and correctly according to their agreed internal working processes. The contradiction is caused by isolation from the other OUs processes and decision taking. Information Management has the capability to inject workflows that ensure awareness of parallel processing of requests from the same source and the, possibly mandatory, sharing of key milestone information throughout the process. This should then result in coordinated and well-documented responses to the requestor.
Knowledge sharing can have a free-flow component as well as mandatory components to fulfill specific business-process needs. Information management also covers the mandatory processes that govern the required structures from document management to business workflow implementation and maintenance. Knowledge management could be seen as the managed part of knowledge sharing within an organization.
The role of this consultancy, together with the support of its technical specialists, would in the first instance be to review the current as-is information management situation in an organization and then, based on this review, prepare a structure and roadmap focusing on establishing collaborative processes that would prevent duplication of information and disconnectedness amongst units.
The resulting plan and roadmap can then be used to test the current implementations of the IT tools and come to an effective implementation of these tools towards the formulated goals.
Please select the tab Challenge III
Challenge III: SEARCH & PREVIEW
Searching for information is a difficult task, even more difficult than looking for a needle in a haystack - one does not even know what the needle looks like! There are many types of search tools, each with various pros and cons. An organization needs a customized and customizable and flexible tool that can be tailored to its needs, customized to the user, and allowing advanced search criteria, in order to yield a narrower selection of useful results rather than a plethora of possibilities, most of which are not needed.
Moreover, as one often experiences, trying to preview the large number of search results can be a major headache. A simple and quick way of viewing the results of the search can save a lot of time and effort in order to more quickly find the exact document and page with the searched for information. A user-friendly preview tool that reduces the steps to assess the data is an additional time saver, and helps ensure that the correct document is not unnecessarily missed.
Please select the tab Challenge IV
Challenge IV: FUSION
The multiplicity of existing tools and databases used to store data across a large organization, not to mention the very different formats of these data, is often a challenging problem in the management of data. There is a need for a tool to act as a data broker between the many databases and systems storing the data. The various data sources must be linked or fused together in such a manner as to allow seamless access to the data without consideration of where it lies.
Fusing together all of an organization’s data - Migration and data accessibility.
For organizations and enterprises data accessibility and migration has always been a challenge. With the growing popularity of MS SharePoint migration issues from all kinds of data sources and repositories are numerous. Apart from SharePoint all kinds of other data systems can be endpoints in data linking or migration projects. Fusion, made by No-Code Solution, is a comprehensive self-contained application that enables such migrations and linking in a no-code fashion. This means that the application does not depend on MS SharePoint being installed and that the IT department does not have to go through time-consuming and error-prone coding exercises. Fusion supports all major database systems and can work with all major Line of Business systems like MS Dynamics CRM/AX/NAV, SAP NetWeaver, OData services, etc. (Currently the product is presented in a very SharePoint centric manner but Fusion is an endpoint to endpoint data management tool where endpoints can be almost any database, file system and content management environment.)
