Are You Maintaining Your Taxonomy?

Once you have deployed your Knowledge Portal or Knowledge Management (KM) System’s taxonomy, controlled vocabulary, information architecture, achieved initial search engine optimization (SEO), and deployed to your users, you're done! Hold on... You're not done yet! As a matter of fact you have just begun! Now you must execute your strategy on how you will maintain the knowledge portal's taxonomy and its underlining taxonomy infrastructure.

In your Knowledge Management Strategy, indicating how your organization will maintain the underlining taxonomy infrastructure, which involves the requirements, and tools, will be essential to the ongoing success of the Knowledge Portal (KM System). When you think of what requirements are needed consider the following:

• How easily and can categories added, edited, or deleted?
• How easily and can relationship types and relationships between your knowledge and its     associated content be defined, edited, or deleted?
•  Does a change propagate to all instances?
•  What users and their permissions need to be established on an ongoing basis?
•  Determine what assignment or modification of privileges to one or a group of items is needed?
•  Taxonomy Governance requirements (approval, new, change, etc. workflows that maybe needed or modified)
•  Metadata/Controlled Vocabulary requirements (assign attributes to a category, associate controlled vocabulary with metadata field, and thesaurus capabilities)

In determining what tools you should utilize to assist in managing your taxonomy infrastructure consider the following:

• Tools that have Taxonomy Development capabilities, which include establishing user roles and permissions
• Tools that have Taxonomy Maintenance capabilities, which include adding, editing, moving, and deleting items
• Tools that have the ability to assign or modify privileges to one or a group of items
• Tools that have Taxonomy Governance, which lends itself to the development and maintenance of workflows for knowledge content
• Tools that have Metadata Controlled Vocabulary, which includes assigning attributes to a category and associating controlled vocabulary with metadata fields as well as Thesaurus capabilities
• Tools that have custom reporting capabilities
• Tools that have application integration APIs (WSDL, Scripts, etc.)

Below is a table containing some of the most widely used taxonomy/controlled vocabulary tools in currently use. I would encourage you to contact these vendors and also refer to the latest Gartner, and Forrester analysis before you decide to bring a vendor in for further discussion.

TAXONOMY TOOLS

Vendor	Taxonomy Tool	URL
Apelon	Apelon Distributed Terminology System (DTS)	http://www.apelon.com/Products/DTS/tabid/97/Default.aspx
Synaptica	Synaptica	http://www.synapticasoftware.com/
SAS	SAS Ontology Management	http://www.sas.com/text-analytics/ontology-management/index.html
SmartLogic	Semaphore Ontology Manager	http://www.smartlogic.com/home/products/semaphore-modules/ontology-manager/ontology-manager-overview
WorldMap	WordMap Designer	http://www.wordmap.com/
protege	protege	http://protege.stanford.edu/
Mondeca	Intelligent Topic Manager	http://www.mondeca.com/Products/ITM
idera	SharePoint Information Architect	http://www.idera.com/SharePoint/sharepoint-information-architect/

Aligning KM and ITIL Process

Knowledge Management (KM) is taken hold in many organizations. The implementation of KM will depend on how the organization views and leverages its knowledge assets (people, process and technology). Processes such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) are recognizing the value of KM and incorporating its concepts within the ITIL framework. The alignment of ITIL and KM occurs specifically through its Problem Management and Service Management processes.  This alignment emerges through ITIL’s latest version, ITIL v3.

Knowledge Management in ITIL v3 was added as a new central process. This one central process is responsible for providing knowledge to all other IT Service Management processes. In ITIL v3, KM becomes a requirement within the processes of Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operations and Continual Service Improvement.  As indicated in ITIL Wiki, “ITIL Knowledge Management aims to gather, analyze, store and share knowledge and information within an organization. The primary purpose of Knowledge Management in ITIL is to improve efficiency by reducing the need to rediscover knowledge” (ITIL Wiki, 2012).

The Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS) serves as the mechanism to facilitate KM within ITIL. The SKMS as stated by ITIL “is the central repository of the data, information, and knowledge that the IT organization needs to manage the lifecycle of its services” (ITIL Wiki, 2012). However there are shortcomings of how KM has been integrated within the ITIL. These shortcomings have contributed to knowledge being defined inconsistently, which includes a lack of defined and measurable metrics. This identifies the fact that ITIL lacks a sufficient Knowledge Management Strategy. For Knowledge Management to work with ITIL v3 it must be integrated with industry recognized Knowledge Management Best Practices.

To mitigate these shortcomings the primary activity will be to provide a Knowledge Management Strategy. The focus of this strategy must be to identify and support the service management needs of the business and associated IT environments currently and one to three years out. Next step will be to create a historical repository of incidents to support the service desk and incident and problem management processes. This knowledge repository will be difficult to develop unless the organization has kept historical records of incidents. However if no historical information is available, it’s no time like the present to start this process and be sure to include incident/problem resolutions and associated fixes. In addition integrating KM into Incident, Event, Request, and Access Management as well as Problem, and Release and Deployment Management processes will be essential to establishing a consistent and structured problem solving framework, as well as environment of accountability and responsibility.

In addition to mitigating the shortcomings of ITIL as mention earlier, the following activities will contribute greatly to successfully integrate Knowledge Management into your ITIL process:

-          Establish a culture of sharing and collaboration within your organization

-          Establish a vision of what Knowledge Management means to your organization

-          Establish how your organization will view and leverages its knowledge assets (people, process and technology)

-          Develop and execute a change management process to support your organization through this alignment and to ensure adoption occurs across the enterprise.

For those who are utilizing ITIL and KM I would like to hear from you! Feel free to provide your comments.

The Case for Knowledge Management

The following was a previous post from the "Process Waterhole". In this time of massive job loss and when employers are asking more for less from their employees I believe this is worth mentioning again:

If your organization is either loosing valuable knowledge due to staff retirement, staff moving to other departments, or dismissed for a variety of reasons, then your organization has a strong case for Knowledge Management (KM). Managing your human capital when staff enters your organization through employee orientation, mapping their roles, responsibilities and their work products as they perform their duties and executing a comprehensive exit interview are all aspects of a KM strategy aimed at moving your human capital to corporate capital.

Take a careful examination of your organization and determine if this situation is something you are dealing with and take the necessary steps to keep your organization viable by instituting a comprehensive KM Strategy.

I look forward to your comments.

The Obama Affect – Knowledge Sharing and Reuse

An important aspect of any knowledge management strategy is to establish an environment of continuous sharing, collaboration and knowledge reuse. During the democratic primary and the presidential campaign the Obama team leveraged email list gathered partly through their internet site and their push for campaign donations through the mail, including list harvested during Obama’s run for the United States Senate. The emails were leveraged (and are still being leveraged) to push out information and knowledge to supporters, solicit donations and to solicit additional email list of people that want to get involved, partly enticed by the possiblility of winning certain promotional items identified by the Obama email (see example - http://www.pic2009.org/page/invite/tickettohistory).

The Obama team would utilized these email list, determine where in the country these supporters live and dispatch teams to these locations to mobilize these and other supporters to get out the vote for Barack. This process was repeated (reused) all over the country. This created a “grass roots” effort to gain support and votes for Barack Obama. The emails served as a vehicle to build organic Communities of Practice (CoP) for Obama, to disseminate knowledge and build support for the Obama campaign and subsequent presidency. This strategy empowered supporters to hold their own functions (lunches, dinner parties, other special events) to showcase Barak Obama’s message and to talk about the issues.

Through targeted email marketing, development of communities as vehicles to share knowledge, and creating and executing a repeatable process, established a foundation to a knowledge management strategy that was able to expand. I will post more about this iterative expansion of the Obama Knowledge Management Strategy as we continue this dialog. I look forward to all thoughts and comments.

Happy New Year!

The Obama Affect

Happy Holidays to All!

During the next several post I would like to examine the affect the Obama presidential campaign, cabinet selections and governing strategy is being shaped by the principles, practices, and technology of Knowledge Management (KM). I am referring to this as "The Obama Affect". This is the first time in the history of American politics that someone has leverage KM in a political campaign and has ultimately changed how politicians will be elected. KM has many facets. Among its many facets KM includes knowledge acquisition, collaboration, knowledge transfer/sharing, and the technology and strategy to effectively leverage knowledge to shape decisions.

The Obama Team has instituted a push strategy executing a knowledge sharing policy that includes disseminating information about the the campaign, transition team, cabinet selections and future policies via , email, mobile devises, and Internet. As the Obama Team continues to add cabinet positions and shape their policy decisions the following links provide some insight into their strategy:

http://change.gov/

http://www.barackobama.com/index.php

http://www.ontheissues.org/Barack_Obama.htm

A good KM strategy Includes:

KM Vision
Valuation of Knowledge Assets (People, Process and Technology)
Conducting Knowledge Audit
KM Strategy Details
· Knowledge Acquisition Planning
· Knowledge Transfer Planning
· Knowledge Sharing/Collaboration Planning
· Knowledge Management System Planning

We will examine each aspect of the Obama KM Strategy and I welcome your comments and suggestions.